I have a pretty extensive home network, with multiple PCs of varying operating systems (XP, Vista, Windows 7), and devices (VOIP adapter, wireless repeaters, network printers). I just installed Safety Minder yesterday and turned on blocking for all categories just to see what it would block and how it would categorize things, and all local IPs (192.168.*.*) were logged as either in the Technology or Uncategorized categories. I'm not sure what all is in the Technology category, but I definitely don't want to open up Uncategorized for my kids just so we can share files and printers on my local network. I tried adding local IPs individually (e.g., 192.168.1.103) and with wildcards (192.168*, 192.168.*.*) but all were denied as Invalid Addresses. However, when reviewing the activity reports for blocked sites, the system will add them when I manually choose Allow this site. I really don't want to have to train this thing by manually having to approve all possible DHCP addresses.
When I clicked on the link to complain about the categorization of the internal IPs as Technology, there was no option to select Other or Home Network. I understand that there is a need to prevent children from accessing certain parts of the home network (I, for one, don't let my kids into everybody else's stuff even on the home network), but opening up or blocking external addresses should not affect internal addresses, and vice versa.
Surprisingly, I didn't find anything on this forum to suggest anyone else has had this problem. Am I missing something? How do I open up the local IPs without increasing my exposure to external addresses?
dbasam, You are correct, this is I think the first request for this type of thing.
Basically what is happening is that Norton Safety Minder is trying to categorize your specific "IPs", and in doing so, is unable to (of course) and comes back with uncategorized.
You could set up local DNS in such a way that you would not have to enter each one but the domain and have subdomains for node on your network.
Without knowing that it is a local network, I think the only "feature" we would need to add is the ability to do wildcards in domain names (it's on the list already).
The ability to use wildcards would indeed be helpful, but in order to do this effectively, you would also need to add the ability ( or instructions) to add specific IPs in IP format. For example, I cannot specifically enter 192.168.1.104 as an allowed address -- I have to wait until that shows up as a blocked address in the activity log and then allow it from there. If I have to go through the pain of allowing each address individually, I'd like to be able to do it ahead of time instead of always after the fact.
I need this same feature. I have a Linux proxy on my home network. Norton Safety Minder is giving constant error messages about 192.168.x.x not being valid.
And as another person noted I cannot add an IP address into the allowed list.