Our goal with Firewalla is to make managing different types of activities more effective and less intrusive. Whether you are at home managing your kid's internet access or at work managing your employee's activities, we want you to have complete visibility and control.
Visibility
The deep insight from Firewalla can help you to 'see' what everyone is doing.
- Activity Alarms - let you know if people are playing games, watching videos, or visiting porn sites ...
- Online/Offline Alarms - allow you to know when your kids came back and connected their phone/iPad/computer to the home network.
Learn more about Alarms - Network Flows - you can remotely monitor what people are doing online, locate the device from the device list, tap the device name, and click to view "Network Flows".
Learn more about Network Flows
Using network flows can help you to gain information on what each connected device is doing. With a bit of knowledge of basic networking, you can detect and block any abnormal activities.
Basic Controls
There are some basic controls that you can use to block unwanted content from the internet. These features automatically identify and block inappropriate content for kids. You just need to turn them on, and Firewalla will do its job.
- Safe Search - automatically filters out offensive content in search results. It supports popular search engines including Google, Youtube, Bing, and Duckduckgo.
Learn more about Safe Search - Family Protect - automatically blocks access to sites with porn and violent content.
Learn more about Family Protect - Ad Block - automatically blocks pop-up or embedded ads (as much as possible) in browsers and mobile apps.
Learn more about Ad Block
In addition, we also provide a "Social Hour" feature that temporarily blocks social networking access for one hour on all devices. One-tap to turn it on and you can enjoy some family social time.
Advanced Controls
Firewalla includes many sophisticated ways to manipulate the network. You can create rules and policies based on specific target domains or activity categories, and apply them to individual devices or globally to all devices.
Blocking Rules
You can create a block rule for a specific activity category including
- social networking
- video
- gaming
- porn
- gambling
- p2p
or a specific target including
- IP subnets
- Domain name
- Region
better yet, specify the application
- Youtube
- Tiktok
- Netflix
- ...
and apply the rule to select or all devices.
Learn more about Blocking Rules
Scheduling of Rules
You can also set a schedule for a rule to take effect. This will be useful to help enforce internet access based on screen time policies you have for the kids.
For example, if you want to block a device from accessing Facebook every night from 9 PM to 7 AM (next day), you can create a new rule for this device, with the target set as "domain" -> "facebook.com", then schedule the active time to "every day, from 9 PM to 7 AM (next day)".
One-Tap Category and Application Blocking
All the blocking actions are conveniently located on the device detail screen. With one tap, you can block permanently, block for an hour, or unblock access to gaming, video, social, or the entire internet.
Blocking the Unknown
There will always be applications that may not be fully covered by the existing rules. Here is an example in which we use the deep insight/network flow capability to detect applications, and then block/limit the use of TikTok:
How to block an application using Firewalla Network Flows?
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Comments
10 comments
How does the "Adult" filter work? Is this OpenDNS or something else?
The family mode is OpenDNS, fully DNS based
Porn block inside device control is both DNS and IP based controls. It will block faster, quicker, and done locally on your blue/red box.
People tend to turn on both ...
Under a devices "Network Flow" the "Apps" tab is always empty why is that? Upload Download and History all have content.
I have the following queries:
@ani
You should be able to create multiple rules to cover different times.
And there is no way to block search terms, those Firewalla can't see on the network.
Hello,
Is there anything to prevent turning off WiFi and using cellular data?
Can URL blocking policy be performed per device/IP and per user? Also, is the full set of 27 OpenDNS categories available for use in Firewalla gold?
The blocking policy can be per device, per group of devices (Gold, or you are on firewalla red/blue beta), and per network segment (gold only)
So is tiktok still an unknown or has it been added to one of the categories? Can I add new sites to the categories to simplify management?
Or are categories based on opendns categories and so those can't be changed?
tiktok is social networking. Categories are computed from various sources, so you can ask us to change anything, if it make sense, we can override
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