Noobie with a Blue Plus - Home School advice
Hi Folks,
I just purchased a blue plus as an upgrade to the parent controls on my home router (Archer C9).
I have to say I am a little confused. Firewalla seems to work from a blacklist mode that allows everything - but then you can apply blocks.
The scenario is that my boys do school at home and I need everything blocked on the PCs except the school domain and all the video servers etc. within certain hours.
After school I then want everything blocked except gaming (Roblox and Steam).
My pre-teen is getting pretty curious about things and I literally cannot trust him at all. No discord. No Vimeo or Youtube - nothing. Especially no google image search. It's just easier if everything was blocked then exceptions are made.
Is there a way to achieve this?
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It is fairly difficult to control traffic by doing block and then allow. This is because the internet is distributed and it is very hard to control services to work since they may talk to different places. (With firewalla, the mechanism is there, this is how you do it https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008521833-Manage-Rules. look for "block"+"allow" rules)
As of kids control, see this https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008214094-Activity-and-Parental-Control
In general
- safe search on kids device
- family mode on kids devices
- devices->[kids device]->[porn block]
If all activated, it should be pretty tight control.
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My kids use Google Classroom features. Found one of them was spending tons of time on Minecraft online from his chromebook. Took some work, but I was able to narrow down the hostnames he was connecting to and put a rule in place to block this. Didn't do time of day. But when I want to allow him to go to those places (aka after school), I put his device into emergency mode. Prob not the best way, but it works.
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I have had to implement a white list type of system i.e. internet access is all blocked - but enable rules allow the particular IPs / domains allowed. My kid managed to do some terrible things with the recommended firewall settings of:
- safe search on kids device
- family mode on kids devices
- devices->[kids device]->[porn block]
It is a total pain having to gather all the domains and addresses involved with a single website - but that is what I have to do. I spent hours unblocking the home school and associated video servers and copyright authentication sites etc.
A handy feature would be to log all activity for say 2 mins and then automatically gather that info into a list and enable that as a rule. That way I could start the 'record' mode and then when I finish the activity - say I go to soundcloud.com and play a song - hopefully all the associated domains / IPs are put in a list - so I can control the say 'soundcloud' list with a rule. This would literally save hours of time for people who need the white list approach...
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