IT controls

[Greenrememberedhills]

Please can somebody tell me whether it is possible to set a timer on the wifi box or similar to turn off the net at a certain time of night? With a password.

One of my quite IT capable kids (aged 13) is driving me mad finding sneaky ways back on the net late at night. Nanny net or similar is unlikely to cut it as he finds a way round it.

We have EE brightbox, by the way.

I've removed his stuff twice now as a consequence for periods of up to a week and it makes no difference, I need a no messing solution.

Thanks.

[WestmorlandSausage]

unplug it and take it to bed with you

[Greenrememberedhills]

Ps I know I can turn the box off, but he just turns it on again.

[Greenrememberedhills]

Wouldn't that cause an issue with all the devices in this house programmed to it? I'm not so tech minded, and DH works away in the week.

[WestmorlandSausage]

no more than setting it on a timer to switch off would. You could just remove the phone cable only and leave it switched on at the plug. Router stays on but just thinks it has dropped connection for a bit.

[Greenrememberedhills]

Ah. The cable at the back of the machine to the phone line?
I see.

Thanks.

[WestmorlandSausage]

the best bit is that the 'local' wifi connection may still show (e.g. his device connecting to the router) but as the router isn't connecting with the internet he won't get the internet but it will still look like he has a wireless signal.

If you wan't to be really mean you could forget to tell him and see how long it takes for him to work it out

[WestmorlandSausage]

yep just the phone cable that connects the router to the phone socket, or any part of it that disrupts the connection.

[Greenrememberedhills]

Thank you Westmoreland.

[niceguy2]

If he's IT literate it would probably take him about 2 minutes to figure it out and get a replacement cable for like £2 from the local computer shop.

Sometimes a technical solution is not the best way. If they're not listening and sneaking on behind your back then just punish them the old fashioned way. Remove their device(s) for x days, dock their pocket money. Hit them where it really hurts rather than play a game of cat & mouse with teenagers who are more resourceful and knowledgable than you are.

[Greenrememberedhills]

Niceguy we had that all last week. Look what effect it had. Back at it on day 2.

[peggyundercrackers]

all routers have an admin account set on them. you can normally access it via a web page/URL - to change the one for brightbox open up internet explorer and type in the address 192.168.1.1 and it will open a page asking for account details, the username will be admin and there is a label on the bottom of it with the admin password - once in you will be able to change the admin password and set the time the router comes on/goes off.

The downside of this is you can reset the password quite easily even if its changed - this is so if you forget your password it can still be accessed.

[WestmorlandSausage]

niceguy2 well he could but then that would be a very deliberate act of disobedience rather than just 'ooops I didn't realise what time it was' or 'oops I only went on for a few seconds to check something'.

and even if he did thats when you could take the whole router.

[Greenrememberedhills]

Thanks all.

I prefer not to take the whole router as I have a year 10 nearly 16 year old and a nearly 18 year old year and they are both responsible. Taking the router would penalise all, and the older one sometimes work late.

But I will in the end if it comes down to it. and stop reading mumsnet late at night

[borisgudanov]

Our Sky router can allow Internet access only during certain times. I think it only does this globally fof the network, so if His Nibbs is denied access, so are you.

A solution in software isn't really trivial and probably means using Linux. I think ypu'd need to run your own DNS server or web proxy, turn off DNS on the router and force every device to use your proxy (by allowing Internet access only for that machine), then have a schedule task or cron job to bring up and take down the DNS and proxy services at designated times. It helps if you can lock him out of the admin access on his PC or device. Then you need a firewall config on the proxy to block access to its administration except from approved machines. These things are easy to organise on Linux, not sure about the practicalities using Windoze. Windoze stuff however as you've discovered is about as watertight as a colander anyway. The DNS etc. would need nothing more than a Raspberry Pi. It could also weed out dodgy sites, track user behaviours and so on.

Of course a mechanical time clock at the router's power point would serve to regulate access by time, but only globally for the whole network.

Confiscating devices for breaches of the acceptable use policy works in this house; I have not found a software method of preventing the use of tablets as missiles.

[borisgudanov]

Oh and one issue with the straight router method or the time switch is that it will just bring the connection down at the appointed time, with no warning. Really it should warn the user first so that work in progress can be wound up gracefully. A proxy server could easily provide decent usability around the switch-off.

Yet another nasty point is that administering the internet connection will no prevent devices being used offline out of hours. A user could diwnload a slew of videos before the curfew and save tgem, then sit and watch them all night. Impossuble to prevent unless you block admin rights on the device and install an ssh server on the client machine, in that case your server could effectively switch his whole PC off at curfew time. Even this won't work on a phone though.