How to Block Specific IP Address (YouTube)

Hi! Correct, blocking it in the network router is the only other way I know of. You have to connect the router to one computer (no other connections) to the router and go into its setup panes to block it. I suggest you get a manual on the router and read up on it. Tom

You might want to try a program called Little Snitch.
It has a free period that you can use to try and if it does the job, buy it.

http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

You definitely want to use your router's built-in blocking tools... This will let you block specific sites just to the point where anyone accessing them will just experience the browser being unable to contact the site. This seems perfect for what you want. It also has the benefit of being able to block only certain computers from certain sites, and depending on the model set specific times when computers may access the internet at all.

This all totally depends on your model, so make sure you read the manual of your router. This should tell you all you need to get going.

Cheers,

Something else you might look at to see if it is suitable for you is to use the DNS servers from www.opendns.com (on your router for example) and set up an account on there, then exclude the sites you don't want accessed - either by the names of the sites OR by the category of site they are.

What that does is NOT actually "blocking the site" as such, what it does is when the workstation wants to resolve the hostname into an IP address, OpenDNS will fail the request. The user will see a browser page from OpenDNS saying that the site was blocked by the network administrator - you can change the wording and even add an icon if you like.

If the user doesn't have admin access to the workstation (whereby they could change the DNS server locally to your ISP's normal DNS, which presumably doesn't offer this sort of lookup-filtering) and they don't know the IP address(es) of the sites they want to access - obviously if the workstation doesn't have to go to a DNS to look the address up, it doesn't matter whether the DNS is blocking the lookup for you - this works well.

There's more information on www.opendns.com - as I said maybe it won't be appropriate for you, but if it is, it's pretty easy to set up and to administer.

That's a pretty good suggestion, especially given the customizability of the site.

This shouldn't be a problem. You just need to log in to the router, using the IP address for the Gateway from your Network Prefs, and change the DNS options to the OpenDNS ones.