can I set my netgear to have a time block? example: 8pm to 5am?
time restriction
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Got it. It is nice that there are people like you in the absence of the staff members! Thank you for sharing your excellent knowledge and for your devotion to this forum. You don't need a staff avatar to be important. Let me ask you something: if there were a way for you to get paid for such good help that you provide, would that interest you? I have often thought that if volunteers do such good work for free, might there not be even more people willing to contribute if they were paid? This is the idea behind my Microroyalties/Crowdsorcery patent that I have pending. I would like to start a for-profit version of Wikipedia. Do you think it would work?
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Of course I would love to leverage any resources you have, but I was really just asking your opinion as a forum user and contributor. Wouldn't it be nice if all of your hard volunteer work could translate easily into a paying job where you could earn extra income without doing any more than you are already doing? Wouldn't router companies benefit by being able to tap into a larger number of highly qualified support people for less cost than bringing them on as employees? I realize this is way, way off topic, but just curious because I've been thinking about this idea for many, many years. And I, like you, don't have a lot of resources or time either. Maybe someone can suggest where the best place to take this thread would be.
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I've thought about how one could make money from this as I see there is definitely a need for better "family" solutions than currently exist. The danger with charging people for advice or a service to help protect their kids is that when it goes wrong, as it will at some stage, they may want compensation. Whereas with advice freely given, there is no comeback.
My idea was to take the open-source router code and extend it to do scheduling of SSID availability exactly as a family would want it: school nights, once-off exceptions. Different SSIDs for parents and children, with different scheduling. I don't understand why this doesn't exist. Yet, from monitoring this thread, it doesn't seem to.
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How many other customers in all industries know better what they need than the manufacturers? But the manufacturers still don't have a good way of listening. I think there is an ego that still exists at almost all manufacturers that they have to be smarter than their customers to feel as though they can justify why they get paid the big bucks and customers should pay them, rather than the reverse. I've heard it called NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. I believe it is a huge and pervasive problem, and I think a lot of it stems from exactly what you just said: product liability. Another is an arcane intellectual property system of laws and customs. I just noticed that the judge in the Apple-Samsung case is now on Twitter. Maybe I can send him this idea!
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@dmcgrane It already exists in the form of various third party firmware, generally all open source, with some being more modular than others. It's a thriving community, with people taking from it what they need, and other contributing what they want to or are able to. For the most part however it is a "hobbyist" niche, with people of various technical abilities doing what they can. It's very much a "roll your own community".
There are a handful of companies making commercial products based on these offerings, but they are much smaller than "first tier" networking companies such as Cisco, Netgear, or Linksys.
It all comes down to money, and whether or not a given company thinks it's a profitable venture based upon history, projected support costs, and the other markets they are already competing in. What you are describing is a relatively niche product, with far more potential customers who don't need that kind of functionality, or need it delivered in a more sophisticated "enterprise" solution.
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I tried every setting in the router and every option in parental controls but found that it wasn't enough. I had an old D-Link router that still worked so I added it to the network, then prevented the children from gaining access to the Netgear directly by changing it's password, then I changed the password of the old router to he password that the children were using for the Netgear. If you look at the network in network places or in Netgear Genie you can't see the old router, it seems to be invisible so the children think that they are connected directly to the Netgear. I also added an electric timer to the power plug of the D-Link router and set the times that it would operate :). One of the boys figured out that he simply had to remove the plug for the D-Link router from the timer and place it in the wall socket, so much for that idea. I then taped the plug to the timer with gaffer tape, that only made it a little harder for him move the plug.
In the end I just went out and purchased a TP Link router that is capable of more than I use but it does allow me to set multiple access times for multiple devices and multiple times for different web sites. It also allows for the restriction of 4 different machines using multiple times per day in the parental controls. Doing it this way all 4 machines have the same restrictions. If you want them to be different then you have to set them up individually in the firewall. I set all devices to static IPs, used the MAC address to control access, and bound each MAC address to the set static IP to prevent spoofing a Mac address. This actually works, I tried it myself. I set a machines IP manually to a different IP than the one assigned for it's MAC and the router switched it back to the assigned IP. The machine then tried to set it back to the manual settings that I put in but the router switched it back again, the computer then seemed to give up and accepted the routers changes (if only our children gave up that easily lol).
As for spoofing MAC addresses even if they did manage to spoof another address it won't work because all other MACs are prevented from connecting. The only way for them to gain access now is to find a device that still works and tether to it, or spoof the MAC address of that device (mine or their mothers) but then the owner of that device would know and might have something to say about it. Of course there is still the Factory Reset button but on this router it looses all its settings and won't connect to the ISP if reset and the devices won't connect to the router without the password being entered via the router's setup which needs a cable connection. So if they try this option they prevent themselves from using the internet and network even for the period of time that they were allowed to use it.
There probably is a way but I have yet to see them get passed this setup
The bottom line is that I think OpenDNS have done what they can but no matter what settings you use with your Netgear router you won't achieve your goal of a fail-safe way to restrict your children using a current Netgear router and software. As it has been pointed out by others and by the new router that I have purchased, the problem is with the router not OpenDNS. Netgear and any other router manufacturer that don't already have the options that parents require will need to come to the party and add them or they will start to loose some of their customers.
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Hi all, there's a kickstarter project (mine) for exactly this. Also, because it's a dedicated device, you set different limits per device too. Check it out https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/koalasafe/koalasafe-is-your-child-obsessed-with-minecraft -
Stumbled across this thread while doing some research for a friend. Looks like Netgear doesn't make it easy. There are several routers now on Amazon that support this feature...and more...just search parental control router. Personally I own a pcWRT router, which works with OpenDNS and provides the most flexible options for setting time limits IMO.
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