Friday, January 23, 2009

Now this is parental control!

Ok - so I am a bad parent. I use Parental Controls on my children's iMac. Part of this is the white list of web sites they can visit.

However websites like Club Penguin sometimes go dark even though the domain is in the white list. Why? Well the service has lots of other server addresses that don't resolve to the domain - just plain old IP addresses.

How do you figure this out? Go to the Parental Controls preferences and look at the "Failed Web Sites Visits" tab? Nope - no such tab.

You fire up the terminal application and you "tail" the "/private/var/log/apache2/access_log". OKAY - now that is a form of parental control - keeping even techie parents young and on top of their command line game.

Thanks Apple.
Thanks kid.

Your controlled parent,

pjk