Generally I'm against Mikrotik as a managed router, specifically because
you can't turn anything over to the customer. Even fairly knowledgeable
consumers won't know what to do with a Mikrotik, and they could do some
dangerous stuff.
With Cambium CnPilot (and probably most products made for this purpose)
the customer can have a separate login with less rights and get a simple
"Linksys" style webpage to do stuff like that. The time based rules are
usually built in feature. I'm pretty damn sure they exist in the
CnPilot, but I'm not in a position to check right now.
When the subject said "parental controls" I thought it was going to be
blocking porno. I'm 100% hands off on that for a lot of reasons. I
looked into it providing it as a service, but I just don't think there
would be enough demand to make it viable. Even if it was viable I'm not
sure I'd want to take responsibility for it.
-Adam
On 1/28/2020 11:40 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
Those of you who supply managed routers (especially if you do this for
everybody), do you set up parental controls?
I had a request today from someone who wanted to turn off Internet at
night to keep his 3 kids from using their devices. I thought this was
kind of silly since they are 21, 23 and 24 years old. (Maybe like
senators who have to put their devices in a cubby in the cloakroom.
OK, I just thought that, didn’t say it out loud.)
This guy has a leased Mikrotik from us, and Mikrotik does have a Kids
control feature that could probably do this. But I don’t want to get
into this, especially because I fear constant requests to override or
tweak the settings. I also don’t want to give customers management
control over a router that we are supposed to be managing.
And in this case he wanted to do it across the board, but many people
might want it set up by MAC address for each person in the family, so
maybe the older kids would have later bedtimes and the parents
wouldn’t have any restrictions. Or they might want the bandwidth
restricted so the kids could do schoolwork but not stream video.
What do you guys do? I’m going to guess Calix maybe has a cloud
portal where the customer can do things like this on their own, while
some settings are restricted to the carrier? What about other cloud
managed routers like the Cambium stuff?
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