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I am not paid to babysit my co-workers. I am paid to manage the network. I do as I am asked by Management and take reasonable precautions against network abuse, but if you are going to circumvent my measures you obviously don’t want to be here, so there is no point in keeping you.

If you want to play games on the internet, do so at home. This is harsh, but times are hard. We need people who are willing to work.

look in the administrative templates in computer configuration.

the setting there overrides the settings in the network adapters’ properties box.

What am I talking about? HINT: it’s in the administrative tools section.

If you want a home user not to be able to change settings in a home environment set up your DNS then get TweakUI (from MS) and in one of the selection you can hide things you dont want users to see. If they cant get to the network settings because the button isnt even on their screen then they cant change it. When you install TweakUI you install it for you only (a choice during install about current user vs all users) then when you need you go in and unhide the selections change what you need and then rehide them. Just make sure they dont know the password to your user id.

In a work enviroment (larger than the home office people), you should have someone who can set up group policies to keep people from doing what you dont want them to. In both cases you keep windows in admin mode so that programs work properly.

That is my 2 cents
-Alex

Your kids can only change DNS settings on the home PC if their accounts have the rights to change DNS. I believe that only administrators can do this on Windows boxes (but maybe power users? I forget.) If you are using Windows or MacOS at home, just create an account for yourself that is an administrator account, with a password, and accounts for your kids which are user accounts.

Many of the things people would like to be able to game go away if they don’t have administrator rights on their systems. This is also helpful in a business environment, as it makes unapproved software a lot harder to use.

-Peter

Changing your DNS servers is a very simple thing to do on most clients. The solution would be to secure a client so that users are unable to change the DNS server and/or prevent DNS traffic from your network to any servers on the outside other than the OpenDNS servers.

You can lock that down by applying a local policy that only your administrator account can change (make sure your local admin account has a password they do not know).