Hi. Thanks everyone for making such a great website and thanks for reading. I'm looking for a Parental Control Strategy.
A couple of years ago I helped my neighbor with a router in order to connect her iMac and Xbox to a single internet connection. It consisted of installing a Linksys WRT54G, enabling DHCP, disabling wireless, and plugging in ethernet. Not much of a challenge. Now a few years on her son is 11 and she thinks some sort of content filtering is a good idea. So she called me and asked if I could help her.
This has proven very difficult for me as there seems to be a lot of solutions where many are not particularly happy in the results, except the most expensive and complicated to administer. I'm willing to do some admin but I can't be working on her machine and router every day.
I'm confused, and I don't have a teenager or access to many router setups to test the network and these solutions to see what is optimal. From what I can gather there are 5 basic solutions (or combinations), from what I perceive as easiest to manage to most time consuming/technical or expensive to manage.
1) Filtering as a function of the OS in OS X.
2) Filtering as a function of an add on program (though I'm not sure which work for OS X).
3) Filtering as a function of a router and/or an additional pay service (some of these are Windows only).
4) Filtering as a function of a router and a separate hardware firewall, or flashing the router with custom firmware.
5) Filtering as a function of a router/firewall built as a separate Linux box with something like ipCop.
Her setup is very straightforward, which I'm hoping to work to my advantage. One Xbox and DTV, and an iMac next to it in view from the sofa and the kitchen (which is what I suggested when we set this up). This way he can play on the Xbox while she is on the computer, and he can be on the computer while she watches TV or makes dinner and monitors his use.
My first thought is to employ option 1 and limit access times through access restrictions in the router. Though this seems like it could be unworkable in some circumstances like holidays etc. Well, I've never done this in the real world and I would hate to give her the impression that everything was safe when in fact it was not, but I don't want to turn it into a massive project either if it's not necessary. Thanks again.
A couple of years ago I helped my neighbor with a router in order to connect her iMac and Xbox to a single internet connection. It consisted of installing a Linksys WRT54G, enabling DHCP, disabling wireless, and plugging in ethernet. Not much of a challenge. Now a few years on her son is 11 and she thinks some sort of content filtering is a good idea. So she called me and asked if I could help her.
This has proven very difficult for me as there seems to be a lot of solutions where many are not particularly happy in the results, except the most expensive and complicated to administer. I'm willing to do some admin but I can't be working on her machine and router every day.
I'm confused, and I don't have a teenager or access to many router setups to test the network and these solutions to see what is optimal. From what I can gather there are 5 basic solutions (or combinations), from what I perceive as easiest to manage to most time consuming/technical or expensive to manage.
1) Filtering as a function of the OS in OS X.
2) Filtering as a function of an add on program (though I'm not sure which work for OS X).
3) Filtering as a function of a router and/or an additional pay service (some of these are Windows only).
4) Filtering as a function of a router and a separate hardware firewall, or flashing the router with custom firmware.
5) Filtering as a function of a router/firewall built as a separate Linux box with something like ipCop.
Her setup is very straightforward, which I'm hoping to work to my advantage. One Xbox and DTV, and an iMac next to it in view from the sofa and the kitchen (which is what I suggested when we set this up). This way he can play on the Xbox while she is on the computer, and he can be on the computer while she watches TV or makes dinner and monitors his use.
My first thought is to employ option 1 and limit access times through access restrictions in the router. Though this seems like it could be unworkable in some circumstances like holidays etc. Well, I've never done this in the real world and I would hate to give her the impression that everything was safe when in fact it was not, but I don't want to turn it into a massive project either if it's not necessary. Thanks again.