Digital Trends

D-Link DI-624 XtremeG

May 28th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Advanced Features Setup (continued)

Interestingly, the URL blocking feature worked well for the most part, but there were a few quirks about it. It had no problem blocking most sites, but when we tried to block URLs containing the word “nothing”, there was one site that was able to sneak through. We were able to block most sites containing that word, and even a Google or Yahoo! search for the word “nothing” would time out. But, we had no problem accessing the site AllAboutNothing.net. We're not sure what this can be attributed to and we were unable to recreate it with other words. The same thing happened with both the “stock” 2.28 firmware, and after we had upgraded to version 2.42. We're also not sure if the Google or Yahoo search block was intended, as there was no mention of it in the documentation, but some users might find that useful. The downfall of this is that you have to manually type in every bad word that you don't want people on your network searching for.

We found ‘Domain Blocking' to be an excellent feature, and one that certainly could be put to use by families with children or in a business environment. The feature allows you to either allow or block sites in a certain domain. For example, we added ‘designtechnica.com' and ‘microsoft.com' to our ‘Permitted Domains' list and network users were only able to access sites in these domains. This function allows you to either allow users to access all domains except those listed in the ‘Blocked Domains' section, or deny users from accessing all domains except for those listed in the ‘Permitted Domains' section.

Finally, the filters features allows for blocking Internet access for specific computers on your network, based on IP address or MAC address. This feature can be time-based also, so you can permit or allow specific machines to access the Net for certain time periods.

When testing all of these features, we did notice that the router would hang up after a little while. After adding and removing URLs and hitting ‘apply' to change the settings over and over again, eventually the router would just hang up and we'd lose our network connection. This did not happen all of the time, and really only when we were trying everything out. But when it did, we'd have to either wait a minute or two, or sometimes even have to manually restart the router to bring it back to life.