Crash webfilterDNSd - web browsing issues - with parental controls

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Level 1

9 points

Crash webfilterDNSd - web browsing issues - with parental controls

My child has been complaining about random browser oddities since I upgraded to Yosemite.

It appears that wi-fi stays connected, yet he can't reach any website via any Safari or Chrome.

If I log in, everything works fine for me. I started looking on the web and saw a few random suggestions re: wi-fi, DNS and even bluetooth. None of that had any effect for me - which made some sense since my account worked great.

Then I opened up console and saw crashes for webfilterDNSd which might explain the problem.

Earlier in the day, restarting the computer had resolved the problem. Now that I had a clue that perhaps this process, which I think is tied to the use of parental controls, was at fault I took a different action. I turned off parental controls, switch back to the original problem account and now everything functioned properly.

Is anyone else getting webfilterDNSd crashes or similar issues with accounts with parental controls on?

Details: Mac Mini Mid 2011, Yosemite

Mac mini (Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Oct 19, 2014 7:24 PM

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Answer 1

Hmaira

Level 1

0 points

Oct 20, 2014 8:48 AM in response to timbumn

Hello timbumn,

I've been using a second account on Mac Book Air 2013 for working on Odesk. I have recently upgraded to Mac OS Yosemite (10.10) and ran into a familiar issue.

Next day when I started to work on a project, I have been able to open only non-SSL sites. For HTTPS urls every browser's unsuccessfully been trying to establish a secure connection. In the meanwhile, curl -v https://www.google.com run in Terminal outputs the server response in a few dozens of milliseconds.

While investigating on this issue, I found that Google Chrome connects to a local server listening on an unknown port and then webfilterproxyd connects to destination host. I checked that the port is run by webfilterproxyd located at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebContentAnalysis.framework/Versions/A/Resour ces/webfilterproxyd. WebContentAnalysis seems to be used by Parental Control. So after turning it off, I was happy to open all the SSL sites.

What makes me unhappy is that webfilterproxyd did not hinder SSL connections in Mavericks (10.9).

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Answer 2

timbumn Author

Level 1

9 points

Oct 21, 2014 6:30 PM in response to Hmaira

So, it seems like parental controls are basically busted in Yosemite and the only option is to turn them off.

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