Today I wanted to share a review I did for parental's control on the special router sophos utm.

The home edition is free, and is bundled with all the pro's feature.

Our Free Home Use Firewall is a fully equipped software version of the Sophos Firewall, available at no cost for home users – no strings attached. Features full protection for your home network, including anti-malware, web security and URL filtering, application control, IPS, traffic shaping, VPN, reporting and monitoring, and much more.

NOTE: The Sophos Free Home Use firewall contains its own operating system and will overwrite all data on the computer during the installation process. Therefore, a separate, dedicated computer is needed, which will change into a fully functional security appliance. Just right for the spare PC you have sitting in the corner!

This router need some knowledge to install as it use a computer you might have inside your home, that will be refurbishing to be a router.

I will skip the installaion process to focus on the parental's control, but if you need some guide for that let me know !

The first control, web filtering;

In the web filtering, you can directly adjust the youtube restricted mode, so it's harder to bypass.

You can define quota and time schedule too.

In overall it's a good router to own/make if you got the knowledge for, and it got good configuraiton for parental's control.

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Today I wanted to share some tips and information if you use an ASUS router for parental's control.

For general threat the router got those protection :

• AI Protection, which do the following;
  • Malicious site protection.
  • Infected device block.

For the parental's control there we are limited to hours scheduling but are not a paid addition, which is nice. The malicious site protection is not targeting for the teenagers, but it help to prevent malicious site for users that are not used to be alert for such.

To make it work we need to add the device to the allow list, with the time schedule allocated for it.

The feature got a nice settings to block all. After the setting is set we can Allow specific device.

This feature is nice as by default anonymous mode on Apple Device, the MAC address get changed every time the device connect, so it add a layer of complexity to enable a schedule for them if your teenager want to bypass your rule.

Some printscreen of the panel;

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Hi !

Today I will share some parental control possible if you own a Meraki firewall at home.

First of all, you must know to have the control, you need the Advanced suite licence for the device. Enterprise licence does not cover that. For a strange reason Meraki's enterprise licence is the basic's one, without Content Filtering.

In a nutshell, it exist only 3 way to make it possible;

1. Block Adult Content. That method will block for everyone in the house.

   • Go to the Meraki Dashboard.Navigate to Security & SD-WAN (or Wireless for AP-specific settings) > Configure > Content Filtering.
   • Check the option to Block adult content using the built-in database of objectionable websites.
   • Add custom blocked or allowed URL patterns/categories if needed.

2. Create a Dedicated Kids' SSID. This method is more flexible that #1, as it block adult category on a SSID that the kid device will use.

   • Create a separate wireless network or SSID specifically for children's devices.
   • Apply strict content filtering and traffic shaping rules exclusively to that SSID.

3. Set Access Schedules. This settings would go over the method #2, to make sure no device are left after bed time to naviguate or use the Internet.

   • Configure availability schedules on the specific kids' SSID to turn off internet access during bedtime or study hours.

I suggest those categories to block;

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