Trying to whitelist (NEVER BLOCK) a site
I have added a site to the Never Block list however it continues to be blocked. I have waited the 3 minutes it says for it to take effect and cleared cache and history, but nothing seems to unblock this site.
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Then copy & paste the plain text output of the following commands here:
nslookup -type=txt debug.opendns.com.
nslookup www.example.com. (where www.example.com is the domain you want to block) -
Rotblitz, I finally figured out what's wrong with my setup, based on your past posts elsewhere in the forum.
I have a NetGear router which turn out to have it's own OpenDNS dashboard. I didn't realize until now that this is a different site from the regular OpenDNS dashboard. Now the sites are no longer blocked after I added them to the NEVER BLOCK list in the Netgear OpenDNS dashboard.
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Hi,
Looking at your account, I see that you have both the NETGEAR LPC service and our network based service. We do not recommend having both services in your account. Please submit a support ticket and let us know which service you would like to use, this will prevent future filtering conflicts.
Thanks
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I was told to hold only the domain name like...youtube.com or bing.com now www. before it. This is listed on this site somewhere.
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Do you have an OpenDNS dashboard account in addition to the account you use for managing things via LPC? Which one are you using to whitelist hardeee's?
It sounds like you might have both, since a few minutes is usually the time you are told to wait to expect things to propagate if you make a change in the OpenDNS dashboard. That could account for making a change and then seeing it "disappear" a few minutes later.
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@buckybuoy
"No, it doesn't disappear from the Whitelist."Then, how could you have "whitelisted hardees.com several times this morning"? This is obviously the wrong approach.
What about posting the commands I initially have shown in this thread? This would give us significantly and immediately more insight.
nslookup -type=txt debug.opendns.com.
nslookup hardees.com.
nslookup www.hardees.com.Just saying "it doesn't work" is of no help for us helping you.
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Also not sure why hardees.com is blocked for you at all. It is not in any category:
https://domain.opendns.com/hardees.com
What did you do to get it blocked in the first place???hardees.com is an alias of CKEMKTPRDLB-20131022-983025467.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com. Did you possibly block amazonaws.com or its subdomains by mistake or in error?
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Yes, hallmarkecards.com seem to use the Amazon AWS CDN (Content Delivery Networks) service too (*.cloudfront.net).
Also, I do not understand why someone would block a CDN service. This is the worst idea ever. Doing this will break far too many web sites, because so many depend on such services. mainly the ones from Amazon or Akamai, some also from CloudFlare, Incapsula and the likes.
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Is WhatsApp blocked for you? You check your blocked domains at https://dashboard.opendns.com/stats/all/blockeddomains to find out the related domains to whitelist. After my experience, this would be whatsapp.net. Do not unnecessarily whitelist domains which are not actually blocked.
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Firstly, are you using a Netgear router with LPC? If not then you should post your question in a thread that is not about LPC, or start an entirely new thread.
Also, there is no need to add all of those domains to your whitelist, since two of them are subdomains of snapchat.com. Whitelisting snapchat.com will cause all of it's subdomains to be whitelisted as well.
It's entirely possible that the snapchat app communicates with hard coded IP addresses, in which case OpenDNS can't do anything for you since the app wouldn't use in the first place. What happens when you do try to connect to snapchat? How is that different from when you are connected to a different network (such as the phone providers data network or a public WiFi hotspot)?
If you were using the OpenDNS Home product I'd tell you to check your OpenDNS stats and logs to see what is being blocked, but that isn't an option wih LPC since it doesn't have that capability. There might be some other logs on your router that give you some insight into where the traffic is going, which might guide you in figuring out what domains you need to whitelist.
You could try user some sort of network sniffer, such as wireshark, to figure out where traffic is going, but that may be beyond your technical comfort level or ability.
You could also search these forums for snapchat related threads, as well as general internet searches to see if they give any insight into the domains that snapchat using for the version of the iOS app you are currently changing. Note, it's entirely possible that the domains the app uses could change with the version of the app your are using, and possibly even with the version of iOS. Unfortunately most vendors are rather opaque when it comes to figuring out what domains they use with your apps so it could take a while for you to find out what domain or domains you need to whitelist.
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Thanks mattwilson9090 for your time.
I am using Netgear LPC. When unblocking snapchat.com did not work then I included subdomains for trials and also these were getting hit and blocked when trying to run snapcat app on iPhone. I have created few time blocks and allowed Video Sharing category (snapchat was getting blocked because of this category) in these blocks. This mean that I have to allow category to let snapchat run, ideally I wanted to white list snapchat.com only not whole category. Thanks..
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Like I said, adding those subdomains is pointless. If you already have the domain whitelisted adding subdomains only serves to use up one of your whitelist slots, it won't magically start whitelisting the subdomain, but not the domain itself.
Unblocking the video sharing category like you've done does validate that the snapchat app is using a domain to reach the servers rather than an IP address. That's a good thing. Now you can either continue unblocking the snapchat domain that you've been doing, or you can follow some of the ideas I suggested for ways to figure out exactly which domain the snapchat app is using, which obviously is not snapchat.com. That's not an uncommon thing, since many apps either use different domains from the primary one, though some do make things easier on people by using subdomains.
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