How to stop WIFI access to/from selected laptops/PCs?

[resander]

Using a Superhub 2 in the living room that feeds two desktop PCs on the ground floor using wired cable connections and 4 laptops on the second floor using wifi.

Two of the laptops on the second floor are used by our children and I want to stop them using wifi during the night, but not any of the other computers. I have caught them too many times using internet 2 or 3am and that is not good for health or academic performance the next day.

I have no experience of blocking wifi, so googled a bit. Some matching threads suggested using MAC address filtering provided by the Superhub to disable access to the MAC addresses of the childrens laptops.

Q1. how do I find the MAC addresses of their laptops? Their laptops run Windows 7 and Ubuntu and using them requires passwords that I do not know. Can I get their MAC addresses from the router. How? Only I know the password to the router, so if I can block night wifi access they would not be able to to restore their MAC addresses from the router.

BUT

Q2. someone told me a router reset would reenable all mac addresses. Is this so?
Then this method would be useless because the children would soon figure it out and sneak down to the router and press the reset button. Cannot physically stop them doing that because the door to the living room is not lockable.


Moving the router to our bedroom would stop them resetting the router during the night, but this would require a lot or recabling - house Virgin access point to router and desktop pcs to the router and that is too big job for me and might even impact speed or performance.
So, I want to leave the Superhub in the living room where it is now to feed the desktop PCs on the ground floor and maybe use another router/modem with the Superhub in modem mode for wifi access to the second floor assuming the other router/modem supports MAC address filtering. The house is getting 120mbs Virgin broadband and I would not want to lose wifi performance by using an unsuitable router/modem.

Q3. would this method make it harder/impossible for the children to unblock their wifi and continue during the night?
Q4. if so, what router/modem should I get?


Q5. any other ways to do the blocking?


Ken

[qasdfdsaq]

Q1: You want to block access to your children's laptops but don't have access to your children's laptops? Sounds fishy. MAC address blocking is not reliable. Anyone can arbitrarily change the MAC address to anything they like once they realise theirs is blocked. They could easily change it to be identical to yours, so that you can't block them at all without blocking yourself

Q2. Yes.

Q3. Depends how intelligent these "children" are.

Q5. Change the password.

[General Maximus]

there are various ways to do it, you could assign static ip's to their macs and then restrict access to the ip addresses, but anything you do is going to be at the router level which will be overcome by a reset. If you can't enforce some sensible rules and provide a suitable deterrent against a router reset then I would suggest you take your childrens laptops away from them and teach them a lesson. It is appalling behaviour to think that if they cant have things their way then they just defy your wishes and reset the router anyway. There is a suitable emoticon for this somewhere

[idi banashapan]

first port of call is to have a proper sit down with your children and talk to them about acceptable use. treat the computer use as a trust exercise and sell it as that. do not chair the talk as though you are telling them off either - talk to them in a manner akin to the level of maturity you wish them to act at. if they prove they can be trusted, reward them. don't go straight into punishing them by blocking their access - this will only serve as a catalyst into defying you or actively seeking out ways in which to circumvent your efforts to stop them doing whatever.

if you still find you get yourself to a point where you need to assert an authoritative stamp on the situation, buy a cheap router and set it up for wifi for the kids using a separate SSID and password. change the password on your normal wifi and do not tell them what it is. give them access to the new router. then at night, unplug it and put it in your room. job done. they will have no wifi they can connect to.

[swoop101]

quite easy.
Tell them that if you catch them doing it again you will remove the laptops when you go to bed.
My two sons both understood that a computer was a privilege and not a right, if they stepped outside the rules they lost the item for a period of time.

[Russ]

The OP is looking for technical information, not advice on parenting.

[Angua]

Just a thought. Are you able to change the WiFi password? That way they would not be able to connect.

[jamiefrost]

It gets increasingly more difficult the more the children know about commuters and there are workarounds for everything.

You can limit access to MAC addresses only but these can be changed on a PC, of the kids are at this level of knowledge then the best way maybe to change the WiFi password each night but that could be a right pain.

Even this can be get round by resetting the route and the default password is then in use again.

Ideally they should not have admin rights to the PC to limit what they can do, the router I use limits the use of the internet to certain macs addresses at certain times.

One hour before bedtime it goes off not on again until later in the afternoon.

HTH

Jamie

[swoop101]

The OP wanted to stop his kids from surfing at night.
The info is relevant.

[Russ]

The OP posted this in Networking which clearly indicates technical information is required. Had they wanted parenting advice it would have been in the Lifestyle section.

[idi banashapan]

sometimes the best answer isn't necessarily where you think you should look for it. help/advice was offered above and beyond the request. surely people shouldn't be reprimanded for trying to help based on experience? I hope that this forum is here to help others where they can be helped, especially by others who have first hand experience of a situation. it would be a shame to start limiting responses based solely around word-for-word questions. how could we possibly encourage further assistance or debate if we were to do that? the OP doesn't need to take heed to the additional advice offered. I would expect people are able to filter out those comments not applicable or required.

[resander]

Many thanks for responses.

When the children did their GCSEs we did not have this problem. They had to be in bed 10 in the night to get enough sleep to be in school at 8 in the morning every school day. Now they are doing the A-levels and most of the time their classes start late morning or after lunch, which means they can usually get 6-7 hours even when they surf in the middle of the night. They claim most children of their age do this using laptops, tablets or smart phones playing facebook, twitter etc for hours. That may be so, but I am against it because they are not getting good quality sleep at regular hours. I tell them to read books or do some sport, but they prefer social networking, watching movies on their laptops. I want to reduce this; the first step is stopping the late night Internet usage.

The children have used PCs and laptops for at least 6 years and know how to look for things on the Internet, installing/uninstalling Windows and Ubuntu, dual-booting etc. If I put some parental-control software on their laptops they would know how to uninstall it or just reinstall the OS, so control by software is not going to work either.

The children are 17 and 18 years and I don't think confiscating their laptops during the night is appropriate. They would just continue using their smart phones. Confiscating these too would cause daily wars and friction. They need their laptops and smart phones everyday, but not in the middle of the night.

From what I understand a router reset restores default values in the router including login and password and WIFI password so the children can easily continue surfing after pressing the router reset button and changing the wifi password on their laptops to the default.
I can physically stop a router reset by fitting a lock on the living room door or putting the router in a (bird) cage with padlock.

Idi Banashapan suggests using an additional router/modem for the wifi for the children and physically remove it and keep it in our bedroom during the night.

Q6. there is only one coax cable coming into the house and that plugs into the Superhub.
How would I connect a second router to the coax cable? and would the Superhub and the additional router be able to work in parallel without getting the data mixed up?

Ken

[Qtx]

I suspect you put the superhub in modem mode (which disables the wireless on it among other things) and then plug the additional router in to one of it's ethernet ports. Then everyone connects to the wireless on that router. So the Coax still only goes in to the superhub.

You may have to set the additional router to have it's gateway as the IP of the superhub. Not 100% sure but that should be all that is needed.

P.S: Hope I make it out of this thread alive, seems dangerous to post here

[idi banashapan]

I would suggest keeping your setup as is, but add in the additional router purely for the use of the children to connect to. Do not put the Superhub in modem mode.

You can set up the additional router by plugging it into the Superhub via it's WAN port (the port you would ordinarily plug into the internet on the additional router plugs into any LAN port on the Superhub) and set the gateway of the the additional router to be the Superhub. This allows you to then set up the additional router as it's own network - that is to say, it can be used to distribute DHCP addresses and have a separate SSID (wireless name) meaning you can segregate the children's devices from the rest of the home. This means you can control the device the children connect to completely independently from the superhub, which everyone else uses. You can then remove the additional router at night time, meaning none of the children's devices will have an internet connection, provided you change the Superhub's wireless password and don't tell them what it is.

so your setup would be something like this:



Do consider these likely 'get-arounds';

1) they could tether their phones to their laptops
2) they can still plug their machines directly into the superhub

There are a number of routers out there now that have built in parental controls, allowing you to restrict usage times from particular devices.

[jamiefrost]

Alternatively you can get a hub that does guest Wi-Fi access, and set this up as a timed access and parental controls. The Asus router I use is really good.

Still doesn't get around the problem that a simple reset of the super hub and or router will set everything back to default.

J