Setting up your Home Network to be Kid-safe

Last week we received the phone call dreaded by parents – the three-teacher meeting.  Apparently, words were said on the playground that ought not be said on the playground.  Ahem.

Anyway – unfettered access to the internet was deemed to be the culprit (more specifically, YouTube), so I had to put a filter on our home internet toot-suite.

Now, we have four working laptops, two iPads, two Android phones, a television, two DSs and a desktop computer that can all access the internet.  Ahem.

So, the first port of call was to set up Open DNS on the BigPond Modem Router (a Netgear one).  However, Telstra BigPond doesn’t allow you to have a static IP, and you can only use a different Domain Name Server if you have a static IP, so the next thing to do was put in place a new router (a Netgear WNDR3800) that does use the Open DNS servers.  This cost about $170 from OfficeWorks, but you could probably get away with a much cheaper router.  Leave the original modem router on default settings and configure the new router to use the DNS servers of Open DNS, and plug all your devices into it (including the WiFi network).  

Open DNS gives you fine-grain control over what websites can be seen – it blocks the ‘nasties’ by categorising websites into 56 groups that you can turn on-or-off.

That arrangement worked sort-of fine, except that as BigPond has a dynamic IP, and you can’t change that, you need to install the OpenDNS Dynamic IP Updater tool to keep Open DNS’s record of the IP applied up to date.  That’s good, but you do have to have that PC on whenever the IP changes.  However, unless you reboot the modem, that rarely occurs so I haven’t noticed it as a problem yet.

So… Open DNS blocks all devices on the network from accessing the big bad world (we configured ours to give a cutesy message that on the Team Axe network, this site is blocked – ask the parents if you want access to it).  

But… that still lets more in than you’d care – for instance Google still shows previews of the websites it’s indexed.  And Google Images without SafeSearch, using a two-word key search, quickly accesses more pornography than I had available during the entire decade of the 1980s.  

Ahem.  

So, K9 Web Protection was then installed on the Desktop Computer (very easily configured) and on the iPad and Android devices.  This program is set to bark when a bad website is hit.  These all work pretty well out of the box for all three and are very easily configured (download for the Android by typing K9 into Google Play, and a similar search in the App Store will give you the same result for the iPad). K9 enforces SafeSearch on Google on the desktop, and forces apps on the Android to redirect to K9’s proprietary web browser (never a thing I like, but there yo ufo).  It also blocks YouTube – you can unlock that for short periods of time with the administrator password.

On the iPad you have to enable iPad’s restrictions and delete any third party browsers (e.g. Chrome) and disable Safari (sigh).  So it’s better on the Android in my view.

Overall, it is a bit annoying having to unlock my phone and iPad all the time to watch YouTube.  Still, the price of progress.  

At the end of this process I have:

  • Three wireless networks (one open access at the modem router, and a 2.4 and 5ghz wifi network that is blocked – you need both as older devices can’t access the 2.4ghz network)
  • K9 on Desktop and major devices
  • Enforced SafeSearch and a clean internet feed for home that is maintained by others.
  • Set the Router to once a week send a list of all accessed websites to me (this trick alone has elicited several tearful confessions).

I will point out that this is not foolproof.  For instance, simply unblocking the network cable from the new router and putting it into the old modem will bypass all controls.  You can stop that by locking down the router more.  

If your ISP allows unmetered downloads, particularly for say TV watching, you may wish to set the TV up to access the open network, as changing the DNS mucks up the ISP’s unmetered downloading.  I may yet do that.  

Anyway, recording this set up for posterity and the information of other parents out there that would prefer not to wait until the dreaded phone call is received.  Obviously, password-protect all the wifi networks. I hope this helps.

2 thoughts on “Setting up your Home Network to be Kid-safe”

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.