See if you can put AdGuard Home on your router

r/firewalla its how I monitor what my kids are doing

I think OpenDNS has some paid, custom DNS services you can sign up for. Basically you would set your home DNS to the IP they provide you and you can look at usage and set blacklists yourself. So whatever connects to your home network would go through that DNS if that is what you have set as default DNS.

When you say school computer, do you mean a computer they use for school (bought by you)? or a computer bought by the school and given to your kid?

It would be hard to know what all they have on it if the school purchased it. I do IT and have spent many hours just trying to get around the software I put on the employees PCs, to see if its possible. It usually takes a bit of knowledge about the individual softwares, and there’s no telling which one they use.

Assuming the school bought it, I would go for a dns based solution, block the content from outside of the laptop. That also makes it much harder for someone to get around IMO (but thats debatable, and depends on what you know)

I’m all for adult monitoring, not electronic monitoring. If a computer is in the room, it’s at a desk and the door is open. You can look at the traffic patterns of the child but no blocking. At 12, our children did their schoolwork at their desk in the kitchen. It wasn’t until high school that they could move into their room. My approach was always, provide grades to keep freedom. Don’t provide grades and you’re back at the kitchen desk.

Would changing the study location be an easy solution? Say doing studies at the kitchen table or similar where its easy to keep an eye on in-person while doing other chores around the house?

Check out Firewalla.

It’s a combination security appliance -think a router with IDS, IPS and firewall capabilities.

I have it and love it. After coming home from working on IT all day at my company, I just want my home network to work. Firewalla does that, but with all the extra goodies that an IT guy could want.

It also has a “monitor only” mirror mode if you really want to keep that Asus router.

12! Good luck :)

Mine is 6 and getting her first actual online tablet this year from Santa.

In the meanwhile I am rapidly stablising an OpenVPN on pfSense with the worst proxy deny list you have ever seen! Her device will be configured like a corporate device such that if it connects to the wifi the VPN opens and all traffic goes via it… and via daddies firewall, ad-filter and SSFW proxy.

Whatever you do just be aware there is a very active black market for phones / etc that are fully open in most schools across the world (bigger black market than for other stuff in this region).

I know what you’re facing. I have similar issues with my children. I’ve skimmed and read through most of the responses you’ve received here. My input on this issue is that my children were issued Chromebooks that are managed by an mdm and which send everything through a VPN which prevents any kind of monitoring, blocking, or filtering at home or any other network they connect through. The only solutions available to me is to constant over the shoulder surveillance or MAC blocking, but there are several neighbors who have a strong enough wifi signal that my son can and will switch to one of them (the ones he knows the password to or using the open guest access). Physically locking up the laptops when homework is done and at night is what I have ended up doing.

I’ve only tried Adguard dns. They provide a family protection filter and you can view traffic live or see a 1 month history along with what got blocked, websites managed under categories and everything u could ask for. There might be better options but definitely check it out too. The free plan includes 300k filtered requests per month and you can pay a bit to make it 10m. I personally have like 160k

My kid has figured out how to defeat any router based parental controls by simply enabling randomized MAC and forgetting and reconnecting to the network under a new mac that is not on the same Rules that was set previously. My solution for this was to upgrade my router to a Asus router that allowed me to create a Whitelist for MAC’s so in his attempt to Randomized the new mac isn’t on my whitelist so it can not connect to the network even if he has the password. Kind of wanted to avoid this because it does make connecting new devices a touch more difficult but I figure when guest are around I can enable guest network while they are around and disable it when they leave. And its not like we have a bunch of new Wi-Fi enabled electronics that we buy all the time so it isn’t too bad.

Now since this computer is a school based computer it is/or atleast should be so locked down that you can hardly do anything on it. My asus router does have controls to make family groups: Preschooler, School aged child 6-13, teen 13-18, and adult 18+. The family groups allows me to create individual profiles for each kid, when the internet will turn on for them and turn off. it will even go as far as to allow me to block what kind of content they are able to access so off bat porn, illegal and violence and gambeling has been blocked… but it goes as far as to list the following:
Internet telephony, Instant Messaging, virtual community, blog, mobile, file transfer, peer to peer, games, media streaming, internet radio. basically I mark the entire list when say they are grounded and should only get online for school purposes.

End of the day if he wanted to defeat the content filtering he could, my more primary concern was him trying to stay up until 3am playing a game and missing the bus. Which with the whitelist and shut off time that has helped alot. If monitoring content is the primary concern, the best method is to keep the PC in a communal area