How to Block https www.facebook.com

There are so many questions on how to block https facebook.com in the internet, yet there is no easy answer for it. Facebook and other social networking are blocked in school and other other establishment for the reason that it affects the learning process of students and productivity of employees.

In my case, I been blocking facebook.com in pfsense server through squid. Although it is working perfectly , some users have found a way out by accessing the same url with https in place of http.  To solve the problem I need to block https facebook in firewall rules.

How to Block https www.facebook.com

To do this  of course we need to a pfsense firewall in our network. We need to download the pfsense installer from this link. You need also to install the squid proxy server to block some of the restricted websites. Here is how to install and configure Squid as a transparent proxy on pfSense. 

Assuming that you already have pfSense setup. The next thing that we’re going to make is an alias. Select ‘Aliases’ from the firewall menu. Hit the ‘+’ icon to make a new one. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Provide the name of the alias, add the host, set the type of an alias as a network ,you can also add a description, and most importantly, you’ll need to specify it by IP address then select the CIDR (network mask) that pertains to each entry. Please refer to this post, Facebook IP addresses, to use the appropriate facebook IP addresses.

Create another alias for the port. Use port 443 for https and port 80 for http websites.

We’ve created the needed aliases, so now we need to tell pfSense to do something about it. So, from the Firewall menu again, add a Rule. We need the rule to go on our LAN tab.

Set the above rules based on these criteria:

• Reject the the traffic from the LAN
• TCP connections
• source is LAN subnet
• Destination - select host or alias and put in the name of your alias.
• Set the Destination ports as other and select https
• No need for any of the advanced options
• leave the schedule as none
• leave the gateway default
• and give it a descriptive name for future reference. 
• Now, Save and Apply. You’re done.

This is the easy way to block HTTPS websites including facebook.com in pfsense server. If there are better methods to  block https websites, please leave a comment on this page.

UPDATE: In addition, you can use www.nwtools.com to determine the CIDR of the sites you wish to block.