5. Firewall Features - URL Blocking

The steps to get URL Blocking to work are not completely intuitive, but not impossibly hard either. You must enter up to 32 URLs or key words and then return to the Access Control screen and add the PC (or range of PCs) that you desire to be affected by the Filters.

I didn't like that when a user triggers a Content Filter, the browser just hangs while trying to get the page. SMC has no option for adding a custom message (such as "sorry, no viewing that website"), so the user is left to wonder, "did the Internet die, or was it something I did?".

The URL Blocking feature, however, isn't very robust in that it can be defeated by using the IP address of the desired website instead of its name. Inexperienced web-surfers may not be savvy enough to know about this trick, but your resident teens probably do.

Once you've added a key word or URL, you can configure a time to have the blocking start and stop, but you can configure only one time period per day.

Figure 10: Time options can be applied to rules, but only once a day

I also found you must enter something in the Schedule Rule Comment field, or the rule cannot be saved.