So my parents are trying to do some parental controls for my younger brother and the isp provided router isn't cutting it. They've asked me to find them a router and I know that the best solution would be a pfsense router, but I don't think my parents would be able to manage it and I don't want to have to do tech support for them every weekend. So what's a good solid router for home use with a good GUI that would also provide some good parental control for content and device access?
Instead of running out and spending money, you might start with OpenDNS to see if that meets your needs.
It's not just content filtering that they need. They also need the ability to block certain devices from the internet at certain times. The current router doesn't list all devices on the network even though all devices are DHCP to my knowledge. We also tried the whitelist only method but apparently that isn't working properly with this router.
These are pretty amazing little routers. They are ridiculously capable for a $50 device. The Edge OS firmware runs on top of Debian. They provide a friendly, comprehensive GUI as well as a terminal. So, hardware resources permitting, you can do literally anything in the terminal, including downloading and running .DEB packages.
IIRC, the firewall rules support scheduling (it has been several months since the last time I deployed one of these - please verify this), so you can easily block Internet access per host, based on a schedule which you establish.
Alright, thanks! That helps a lot.
He's always going to be one reset away from access....And he can make it so your parents wont' even know the difference
Gonna take him about 5 mins to circumvent anything you put on a router
Unless they make ones that don't have a hard reset button?
My experience with ASUS routers have been pretty nice (except AC1200). You can lock him to the guest network and set the times the internet should be active. I believe there should a site filter built in, I will have to look into that since I have the router at work.
How young is he?