Small business website blocking.

[SweatyWhiteJedi]

So I know this is kind of out of the realm of the usual LTT style of stuff but I'm looking for a cheap software that can basically block websites like facebook and youtube from 3 computers. I don't want to block them at the router level because then it would block it on the guest network as well, and the computers need high level access to still work with the software we use on them, is there a simple tool that can block these sites from chrome, firefox, and edge? 

 

[WereCatf]

Point the domains to 127.0.0.1 in the hosts-file on each of the three PCs. Doesn't require anything more than that.

[SweatyWhiteJedi]

All three computers run in a work group and one of them acts as an sql server so I'm not sure if that will break anything or not. 

[Snipergod87]

it wont

[desertcomputer]

Proxy (Squid) - you can set to only allow traffic through proxy and block services like VPNs etc. or DNS blocking but this can be easily overcome, but if it for a server DNS blocking and know facebook IP block at router level is easiest.

[SweatyWhiteJedi]

Maybe I should rephrase, I'm looking for a simple software that I can show an old person how to setup to block websites as the problems appear, something where if a new site came out two years from now that replaced twitter and instagram he could just add www.twitter2.com or whatever to the software on each machine to block it. If an employee is running specialized software to get around it or even loging into the software and changing it then its a management issue at that point. 

[Franck]

Software will be hard, it's easy to bypass. Simply stop the process.

 

Hostfile is easy to setup but again easy to bypass and hard to maintain. If you take a website like facebook they have thousands of address that you will have to figure out and prevent in the hostfile. An example for google is you can type http://yul02s04-in-f14.1e100.net/ and it's one of it's millions of valid address that there are website when you can find most of them. (They add and remove constantly these ip). Also easily bypass by deleting the content of the hostfile.

 

Router wise is the best way to do it. You create a static IP for the 3 computers and create a rule for a list of website to deny. then apply the rule group only to those 3 IP.

 

So it depend on how wise the people using the computer will be.

 

 

[SweatyWhiteJedi]

If an employee is messing around in the System32 file then there are bigger issues going on than surfing facebook. I don't think they would ever figure it out if we blocked it that way, however is there a software that could automate this for the guy I'm setting this up for, I don't think he would be comfortable messing with code. If there was a simple exe that let him type in a web address and do a basic block it would be good enough. 

[SweatyWhiteJedi]

So I found this application that does the host file trick, I think this should work for the most part. Thank you all for your help, showing me the host file method helped me refine my searches. 

 

https://www.wintools.info/index.php/url-blocker