Making Parental Controls useful on the Linksys WRT1900AC router?

0

The Parental Controls feature of the Linksys WRT1900AC router in the current stock firmware (v1.1.8.164461) allows only blacklisting of specific websites on a device-by-device basis.

For the purposes of blocking websites that would be inappropriate for my young children to access across all Internet-connected devices in my household, this doesn't seem very useful to me; I don't have a list of all such websites, and even if I did, it would be infeasible to enter the list (which probably consists of hundreds of thousands of sites?) one at a time, for each individual device.

Is there a way to make the Linksys WRT1900AC actually useful as a parental controls device?

Jon Schneider

Posted 2015-01-28T13:33:52.230

Reputation: 893

Answers

0

You can't specifically block domains in the way that you are suggesting, but you could try another approach.

Use OpenDNS - Google this if it's new to you. You tell the router to use OpenDNS, and then ALL devices behind your router are protected. This is how I protect our home network.

Chis

Posted 2015-01-28T13:33:52.230

Reputation: 24

Good suggestion! This isn't foolproof -- for example, OpenDNS can be bypassed by using a DNS lookup website to look up the IP address of a blocked domain, and then entering that IP address into a browser's address bar directly -- but this should be a "good enough" solution for my household, at least for the time being. Thanks! – Jon Schneider – 2015-03-26T15:18:59.787

I'm not entirely sure I understand this solution. The "specialist" sites are still in the OpenDNS records, could you clarify this solution? – Burgi – 2016-10-11T21:30:59.160

Asked: 2015-01-28T13:33:52.230

Viewed: 1 763 times

Active: 2016-10-11T21:28:48.400