Need to run on only one PC in household
I'm not sure if I set this up right. I have a 13 year old foster son with his own computer. I recently did a spot check and there was porn. I cleaned up his PC and locked him out of being the administrator. I set his network settings to use OpenDNS, and created an OpenDNS account. My thought was that with only his PC pointing to the OpenDNS ip address in the network settings, only his stats would show up in my account. I did not change any settings on my router.
Is my logic correct? I checked the stats the next day and it seemed to pick up a lot more than just his traffic. ( He was online for about 4 hours after I locked down his PC).
Also, after setting up OpenDNS, I visited some porn sites on his PC so that I could see what it would look like in the stats, but I did not see those sites show up. Perhaps OpenDNS was still "setting up" to gather stats after creating my account and didn't get the sites?
Sorry to ask so many questions. thanks for reading
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Your logic is correct, and according to your description only your foster son's computer should be using OpenDNS.
What you see in the OpenDNS stats is not the web traffic, but the DNS traffic which are related to each other only to a certain extent. DNS lookups are produced by any networking programs, not just by browsers, without any human intervention, whereas some rare web traffic may not need DNS at all, e.g. if accessed by IP address.
Also, many browsers have DNS prefetching enabled by default and generate a DNS lookup for any possible domain found on a webpage without ever connecting to it. Just think about search results of a search engine, this can be many lookups. You may want to disable DNS prefetching in the browser to get more useful stats.
Further, OpenDNS stats are not real-time, but they take about 3-24 hours to appear.
All of this may well explain the discrepancy between his and your surfing and what you see in the OpenDNS stats.
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Thanks for the reply; i understand what you're saying about DNS lookup not only being generated by browsers. I think i have the issue with inappropriate surfing resolved. I made no secret that I'll see each and every site that is visited and that opened his eyes. If needed, I may look into Qustodio (as mentioned on this site on another post). Again, thanks so much for the reply.
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