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How can I disable internet but keep the network access on Android tablet? I want to be disable internet access to all but selected apps, at the same time I want applications to have direct internal network access.
I used firewall in the past but firewall disables access to all networks. I want to be able to use my tablet in my home, at the same time I want to disable internet access on it.
Is it possible? What is the best way to do create this kind of limitation for the apps?
thanks
As roxan already wrote, this cannot be done on the Android device itself (well, at least not easily), but should take place at your router. Some routers allow to specify on a per-device basis whether internet access should be granted, using a single "switch" (yes/no).
If that's not possible, you'd need to edit firewall rules. This would require to assign a fixed IP to your device, so on your router you could specify e.g. (pseudo-code):
route from <android_ip> to <internal_network> pass
route from <android_ip> to * reject/drop
(again, that's pseudo-code; I'm not that familiar with iptables to give the exact syntax by heart). What that then would do: All packages from your Android device would pass the router if targeted to the internal network, but would be rejected (visible to the Android device, so it could react immediately) or dropped (connections would timeout then) when targeted to the outside.
Basically, as Android uses iptables as well, the same should be possible directly on the device, one might think. But I'm not sure whether that is really true: from the Android device's point of view, everything is targeted outside (to its gateway). Which gives another idea:
I've just checked on my device, and Android indeed includes the route command (though I needed to run it via busybox, e.g. busybox route to show configured routes). So let's assume your local network uses 192.168.0.*, and your router being 192.168.0.1, you could do the following:
# default gateway (should already be defined), but we don't want this
#route add default gw 192.168.0.1 wlan0
route del default gw wlan0
# re-add route for access to the local network
route add -net 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1 wlan0
Now the device should no longer know what to do with packages e.g. for 8.8.8.8, and would return a "no route to host". The example already shows a problem involved: 8.8.8.8 is one of the pre-configured name servers. So make sure you configure your device to use a name server in your local network, if you want name resolution (well, Google's name server won't be of much use for your internal network either).
Not also that your interface used might not be called wlan0. Find out by invoking route without any arguments: this will list all established routes like this:
link-local * 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 eth0
So in this case, I had to use eth0 for the interface.
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 205 0 0 wlan0
This would describe our example, using wlan0 as interface, and 192.168.0.* as network. As on my device this route already had been present in the routing table, it might even suffice to simply drop the default gateway.
I didn't run a test to verify everything is fully working according to your intention (though it should, I might have included some typo here or there). So I'd be glad to hear from you how well it did :)
Droidwall an app will be the perfect answer to that. (ATTENTION: will require root).
On your phone find the network your connected to in the network options connected to and modify network in advanced options change the value to "Static" you can leave the ip address field unmodified but in the default gateway field change it to 0.0.0.0 and hit save. You will get a message that the connection has no internet access but still be connected to your router and will be able to access devices within your local area network. The way you get to this option varies depending on your phone and android version, if your not sure just google "how to setup a static ip address on a (your phone model here)"
