As little children start to learn about the internet and various mobile devices in your household, the first worry that crosses a parent’s mind is what if they access inappropriate websites? Of course, there is no substitute for parental supervision but you can make your home WiFi router a little safer for your children by blocking these inappropriate web sites at the DNS level. And it does not require more than a minute to configure any standard router to use DNS servers that block objectionable domain names. Although you can also use these DNS servers in your PC using our Public DNS Server tool, but configure the DNS servers in the router takes care of the settings for all the devices that connect to the internet through it.
Typically, you have to open the web interface of your WiFi router by entering 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 in the address bar a web browser on your PC. After this, you will have to enter a user name and password. If this does not work, then you should consult the documentation of your WiFi router or look for instructions somewhere on the router itself.
In the router interface, you have to look for DHCP settings section and configure the primary and secondary DNS to any of the publicly available DNS servers that can block domain names that are considered unsuitable for children and teens. There are three set of DNS servers that can do this – Norton ConnectSafe C, OpenDNS Family and Yandex Family.
The Norton ConnectSafe C has primary server 199.85.126.30 and secondary server 199.85.127.30. You can enter these values in your router’s DHCP configuration, save and reboot it. When you try to open a web site that is not suitable for kids, you see a web site blocked message as shown in the following screenshot:
OpenDNS Family is a set of DNS servers specially designed to make internet safer for families and schools. There are many categories of inappropriate web sites that are automatically blocked by OpenDNS Family servers. The primary server for OpenDNS Family is 208.67.222.123 and the secondary is 208.67.220.123. Here is a screenshot of what happens when OpenDNS blocks a site:
Yandex Family DNS servers are from the Russian search giant Yandex. The primary and secondary DNS servers provided by Yandex Family are 77.88.8.7 and 77.88.8.3 respectively. When a web site is blocked by Yandex Family DNS, it shows the message in the Russian language:
In my experience, all these three set of DNS servers work great for blocking inappropriate sites and making the home WiFi safer for the use of the children and teenagers. For more information about Norton ConnectSafe, OpenDNS and Yandex DNS, you can visit https://dns.norton.com/, http://www.opendns.com and http://dns.yandex.com respectively.