pfSense Whitelist Alias Rule for Homescool Website with Embedded Videos

Networking & Firewalls
1

Good afternoon,

Please forgive my ignorance, I have limited networking experience but have successfully deployed and configured pfSense on my home network router. My primary goal, other than the network security benefits, was to only allow access to my Son’s online homeschool website during the day and block all other traffic. I was able to to this successfully creating an alias for the homeschool URL and setting up a rule. However, there are cloud hosted embedded videos on the website, and I haven’t been able to get them to play. I inspected the web pages and determined that the website seems to be using a video player called ‘Brightcove’ and javascript (Brightcove Player: points to players.brightcove.net, and Video.js CDN: points to vjs.zencdn.net). I created rules for these sites as well to include the IP’s and I was able to get the ‘play’ button to show up, but still no videos. Any ideas/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

2

Best way to figure out what is being blocked with Google Chrome:

  • Navigate to the website in Google Chrome
  • Right click anywhere on the page
  • Click “Inspect”, or “Inspect Element”
  • Click on the Network tab
  • Right click on the table that shows the requests for the site
  • Under “Header Options” make sure you see a check next to “Remote Address”
  • Refresh the page and check the Remote Address column for the new requests to verify what IP address they are being served from

Add the blocked IP addresses to the allow list

1 Like
3

Ok, I will give that a try. Thank you!