Find IP Addresses for domains

RouterOS General
1

I am replacing the teacher who took care of the school’s router board configuration.

Can I pragmatically setup a system to find the IP addresses for the domains I want to block from the students?

Can I be advised of a web site that our school can use to find the IP addresses of the domains which we want to block?

We have found 13 IP addresses for Twitter.com that we are trying to block, but our students still are able to access this site during classes, any suggestion as to how to block this site?

2

Take a look at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/How_to_Block_Websites_%26_Stop_Downloading_Using_Proxy

3

yes that is good practice to use proxy to block web content. and you do not have to worry about where to get IP addresses

4

Thank you for your suggestion.

The other teachers and my self do not know how to setup a Proxy onto the 5 Router Board 192’s which we are using.

Could I be advised of how a proxy for these boards is setup.

Thanks

5

just follow the link to wiki posted by krishteins

6

Thank you for your note, can you please advise me as to how I can find a link for the Web-Proxy software being suggested?

Using your suggested system of filtering domains, if this is successful we will be purchasing more 192 Router Boards for the schools.

Our group is graphic software teachers and I am sorry to say not hardware knowledgeable and your assistance in having this filtering system working prior to back to school will be appreciated.

7

This software is already on your RB192 I believe. If you use Winbox (http://demo.mt.lv/winbox/winbox.exe) configuration tool, then you can find web-proxy settings under IP-> Web Proxy → Settings instead of CLI’s /ip proxy . It is quite similar.

8

I’m sorry but schools all over the world are notorious for this. Thinking that anything thing IT related can just be installed and never maintained and yet they still expect things to keep working. The school cannot close their eyes and pray that the routers will sort themselves out. These Mikrotik routers are complex devices and please forgive my direct approach but unless you know what you’re doing, your tinkering will do more harm than good. Rather contract a small IT company to look after these devices. Whew, that’s off my chest now.


Can I pragmatically setup a system to find the IP addresses for the domains I want to block from the students?

Can I be advised of a web site that our school can use to find the IP addresses of the domains which we want to block?

We have found 13 IP addresses for Twitter.com that we are trying to block, but our students still are able to access this site during classes, any suggestion as to how to block this site?

This ‘can’ be done but is a never ending story with no reward at the end. The built in web proxy as mentioned before is your friend.


This is what I would do bearing in mind schools generally don’t have huge IT budgets;

  1. Create a free account with OpenDNS. Then setup your content filtering options including the part where you can specifically block the domains that you have in mind.

  2. Setup the Mikrotik router to use the OpenDNS name servers.

  3. Configure a rule on the Mikrotik router to redirect all DNS lookups to the router (which will in turn use OpenDNS).

  4. Download the OpenDNS ddns client update tool and install this as a service on a Windows box that is always on. This is the tool that updates OpenDNS with your external IP address. This is only necessary though if your ISP hands out dynamic IP addresses.

  5. Explain to both the teaching/admin body AND the kids that this is an all or nothing scenario. In other words if you block facebook.com then EVERYONE is blocked. If you need to have various groups of users having different browsing privileges then a proper content filtering system is required.

Have fun.

9

Thank you for your suggestion, which we will try on Monday.

I have also downloaded the software version OS V 3.24 to setup the Web Proxy and we will see which works best.

Regards