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Parental control not working
Hi I have been using OpenDNS only as Parental controls in Netgear Genie app have never worked. I would prefer to use Netgear genie so i have removed my network from the OpenDNS and I am trying to ge...
I have the default as High and can go anywhere on any device. All its controlling now is my time as I spend it trying to figure this out
I've read through several different threads and saw the workaround advice to set permissions to high and then ease up from high to low on the devices that dont need high level filtering. Unfortunately this doesnt work, the worlds largest and most notorious pornography web sites are still easily accessible through a high level filter.
I'm on my third phone call with Tier 1 support about this issue. Not only is my opinion of Netgear products now lesser than it was through this whole experieince I'm finding that I'm also frustrated with the level of support that I'm receiving from Netgear.
The device was sold to me as brand new at Best Buy and when I called for warranty support I was informed that my device was already registered to another person with only a first name. I hung up on the first time. The second time I called because my name was not Elena (something that I just found to be odd but easily fixed by updating my profile information).
An hour and a half and three phone calls later I'm giving up on Netgear. I was polite, I was patient and was hung up on the first time, denied service the second (by employee #2145), and informed I needed to buy two years of support service on a device still under warranty the third (by employee #1685).
Admittantly I did get some parental control protections by selecting custom settings and disabling adult content, nutity, etc... but not the full protection that I expected. Some of the worlds most popular and notrious sites still come up when I test for them on my kids devices.
If you cant get a feature to work properly, dont advertise that your product has those features. In this particular case, Netgear should not only stop advertising that it's devices support parental controls but also that they provide technical support. What I received was not technical support...I've been playing with the Parental Controls for a couple of years with a little success. A few comments below on my experience...
- I'm using a Model R6300 v2 as my router with other Netgear extenders around the house
- The core OpenDNS settings work as designed
- Change your DNS servers
- Set up your OpenDNS account
- Set your default settings
- And you'll find that sites are blocked
- NOTE: It can take a few minutes between changing a setting and the blocking change taking effect so some patience is required
- OpenDNS isn't perfect though and not all sites are categorised as expected (check https://community.opendns.com/domaintagging/ for specific sites).
- For example, blocking Video Sharing will block access to youtube.com, but the Youtube app uses a different domain that isn't tagged as Video Sharing so continues to work.
- I've also had luck with setting up OpenDNS Bypass accounts, installing Netgear Genie on devices, and then linking them to the Bypass accounts to give them additional priviledges.
- Of course you can't use Genie to bypass on a lot of standard networked devices (Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire Stick, Smart TV, Sonos) so by locking down your whole network by default, you'll start breaking network access around the house.
- I've tried and failed to use the latest versions of Genie (on Windoze and iOS) to force a device to have a non-default setting.
- Sometimes it will work for a while and then stop
- Not all attached devices show in the network map (or in the attached devices page on the router) so you can't even try to change them
- Sometimes making a change won't take at all (you save the change, open the device again immediately, and it's set to default)
So...
I've basically given up now. The software just doesn't seem to work the way it's advertised beyond the ability to set default blocking via OpenDNS (which you can mostly get on any router, you don't need Netgear for that). The only benefit of using Netgear OpenDNS is that you get a little more flexibility in terms of blocked domains (by tag) and a built in timing capability (not available with basic OpenDNS I believe).
If anyone finds a way to make this work, I'd love to know...Thanks!
