How to block a domain from being accessed on a computer

[Sharpstick68]

Hi, there is a website I want blocked from 1 computer in my house, the site is www.justin.tv and i've tried adding the ip in hosts file, the computer is using windows vista and i saved the file after i added the ip, but I can still get to the website. Can anyone help please?

[d4v1d05]

So you've put in the hosts file something like?

127.0.0.1 www.justin.tv justin.tv

[splur]

Could try blocking it via your router specific to the computers ip or mac address?

[Sharpstick68]

no i only put in www.justin.tv i didnt know i had to put that other stuff, i'll try that

[Sharpstick68]

d4v1d05 that worked thank you. is there anyway to have like a custom error message show up in the browser when someone tries visiting the site? my brother's prolly gonna be ****ed he cant get to the website lol

[Colin-uk Veteran]

you could probly make a custom error message if you routed the dns through your own dns server or something like opendns and then customise the error message page. this would depend on which dns server software you used though.

alternativly you could reshack the resource that holds the 404 page on his pc, it would only work on his pc though lol.

[Sharpstick68]

lol thats fine, wheres the 404 page at on the pc that runs windows vista located at? would you know

[Colin-uk Veteran]

I dont know where it is on vista no, i reshacked it once on XP but i never bothered with vista, maybe google would know? :p

[Sharpstick68]

i found something, but it looks like to much to do. i think i'll just leave it as it is and thats that

[eXtermia]

If you point all your DNS to opendns www.opendns.com not only can you block specific hosts you can have custom pages shown for when you try to get to the site.

Registration is free

[Sjokkel]

Did you flush the DNS cache ? try and run "ipconfig /flushdns" from a command prompt.

[Sharpstick68]

no i dont flush the dns cache? why? what would that do

[Colin-uk Veteran]

it would clear out the dns cache.

your computer keeps copies of the websites you visit, so that when you visit them again they load faster.

your computer might be loading the website from that copy instead of the actual website.

[pjw]

If you point all your DNS to opendns www.opendns.com not only can you block specific hosts you can have custom pages shown for when you try to get to the site.

Registration is free

opendns is great, easy and reliable.

[Routerbad]

Hi, there is a website I want blocked from 1 computer in my house, the site is www.justin.tv and i've tried adding the ip in hosts file, the computer is using windows vista and i saved the file after i added the ip, but I can still get to the website. Can anyone help please?

Either use the firewall and block the domain from there (outgoing as well as incoming) or you can set up whatever browser you use to block the site.

[Fred Derf Veteran]

The hosts file is an easy fix for a single computer but if you had multiple boxes then using opendns would be attractive because it would block everything going through your router to that domain.

I gave out a few +1s to people who already suggested this. Does anybody use that feature?

[Routerbad]

He said he only wanted it blocked on one machine. The hosts file didn't work. Windows firewall (block port 80 to the particular domain) would be the first thing I would try because it doesn't require any addon software. If you happen to have an AV product that includes internet protection I'm sure you can blacklist the site within that program.

[+BudMan MVC]

He said he only wanted it blocked on one machine. The hosts file didn't work.

But it did work -- read the thread

d4v1d05 that worked thank you.

He had the entry in his host file wrong is all.

[Routerbad]

But it did work -- read the thread

He had the entry in his host file wrong is all.

Roger that, read it wrong. Thanks for pointing that out!

[Sharpstick68]

alright well, now i want to block all the computers in my house even mine from accessing it, so I wanna do that through the router I guess..but how can I do that? I have a linksys wrt54g router.

[cybertimber2008]

Point the router to use the DNS servers of OpenDNS, register an account with OpenDNS, and block the sites you want to. Simple as pie, and your computer can't get around it (unless they manually forward to another DNS server).

OR you can block that site on the router. I've only owned Netgear and Belkin routers so I can't say how to do it, but it should be an option. And THAT there is no way of getting around, unless they use a proxy.

Dare I ask why you want to block justin.tv?

[+BudMan MVC]

"Simple as pie, and your computer can't get around it (unless they manually forward to another DNS server)."

Which is easy enough to prevent by just blocking outbound on port 53 other than to opendns IPs, but what it doesn't stop is users creating host records to point some domain to an IP or just using the IP, etc.

[Sharpstick68]

my brother visits streams on justin.tv and then leaves the computer while they're still going, wasting bandwidth and slowing down all the other computers in my house and thats why i want to block the site. a friend of mine gave me 2 dns's i should use and he said they are way better than my isps dns's (comcast) and that they never go down.