Netgear DG834 router anomaly

[RogerS]

I've been playing around with the router to see what is possible re blocking sites. I can enter specific keywords into the router to be blocked. Blocking works fine in Safari and Firefox yet in Chrome the block does not work which I find bizarre since the blocking is done external to the computer.

Any network/router experts out there can enlighten me?

TIA

EDIT: Clearing all cookies in Chrome, the block now works. So triply confused now. Why would cookies override what was set-up in the router? Bizarre.

 

[mseries]

When you cleared cookies, did you also clear cached content ? <- that is likely the difference not cookies

 

[RogerS]

No I cleared cache then tried to access the site. Access without blocking.

Then I cleared cookies. Access blocked.

 

[mseries]

I am not clear how this keyword blocking is meant to work, does it attempt to scan the text of the response for your keywords so for example if you blocked the word obama you'd expect to receive no pages that contain that word ?


I am pleased you have it working, I am intrigued as to why cookies made a difference though. Do you know if your other browsers had the same cookies ?

 

[Gerry]

To block undesirable sites on your PC across all browsers you can modify the HOSTS file
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Basically if your browser tries to access a blocked site listed in your HOSTS file it redirects the page to your own PC (127.0.0.1) which loads a blank page.
i.e. there would be an entry in HOSTS like this "127.0.0.1 crapwebpage.com"

This is very useful if you have a server on your network you wish to refer to with a friendly name. Suppose I had a linux machine set up on 192.168.1.100. To view that machines web page I would have to type in the IP address which is a pain. So in hosts I would simply add the line
"192.168.1.100 gerry.com"
all I would then need to do to access my server would be to type gerry.com in to the address bar of my browser.

Using HOSTS like this will block the majority of adverts on pages too.

Gerry

 

[mseries]

that is not the same thing though Gerry. The OP was using keywords to identify the pages (not sites) that he doesn't want to see and using the router will make it work for all computers on his LAN including phones and tablets. You solution will block a request not a response and thus you need a knowledge of the sites that have pages that you wish to block.

 

[RogerS]

that is not the same thing though Gerry. The OP was using keywords to identify the pages (not sites) that he doesn't want to see and using the router will make it work for all computers on his LAN including phones and tablets. You solution will block a request not a response and thus you need a knowledge of the sites that have pages that you wish to block.

And also it blocks the whole site. I'm trying to block a specific sub-section.

Yes, mseries, on the DG834 you can block by URL although that only seems to work at the top domain level....ie you don't seem to be able to block a sub-forum by URL. However, you can add keywords and so implies that the router must scan the content of a page....not sure what the hit is in terms of throughput...that needs looking at, certainly.

 

[Gui]

Just a thought: what site did you use to test the filter with ? If it's Google sites, chrome tends to default to SSL with those (https://) and the router won't be able to scan the content due to the encryption whereas it can with other browsers that use http://.

 

[RogerS]

Just a thought: what site did you use to test the filter with ? If it's Google sites, chrome tends to default to SSL with those (https://) and the router won't be able to scan the content due to the encryption whereas it can with other browsers that use http://.

Good suggestion but no...it was for3.org

 

[Eric The Viking]

I'm with Gui on this one: are you sure you're not using https protocol rather than http?

Typically, any site you log into for commercial transactions will be https. Google searches are also now similarly encrypted, to prevent their search terms being visible to other statistics collectors (although they give other arcane reasons for the change, I suspect I've just given the real one!).

 

[RogerS]

See for yourself! http://www.for3.org

Re-reading the Netgear, it would seem that it just looks at keywords in the URL and not the content. Which goes some way to explain my misunderstanding on that score.

However, still doesn't explain the Chrome anomaly.

 

[mseries]

See for yourself! http://www.for3.org

Re-reading the Netgear, it would seem that it just looks at keywords in the URL and not the content. Which goes some way to explain my misunderstanding on that score.

However, still doesn't explain the Chrome anomaly.

I tried a keyword block at the weekend and was not able to block pages containing the word mseries. My investigations stopped there but I did suspect that it was only reading the URL and not the content. I suppose it's intended to block all variants of, for example google.co.uk, google.es, google.com etc etc.

All my reading about your Chrome problem arrived at the same conclusion as I did, that you were viewing a cached page. Anyway you have it working so no need to dwell on it now.