Before I send my son back to school, I wanted there to be a way in which I could automatically channel his boundless energy into good and productive things while I was knee-deep in conference calls or other issues.
If you are choosing to school remotely and have a Comcast/Xfinity router (as many homes do), you can follow these steps below to enable parental control. Comcast has a basic parental control feature which allows filtering by singular websites. While this may not block every site or be the perfect solution, it comes standard with most Comcast/Xfinity home internet packages.
How to get it done? I hear you ask. Let's begin!
Determining the default gateway
This can be tricky if you aren't computer savvy, but most routers will have an address that is fairly predictable.
Xfinity by default uses 10.0.0.1. There are other well known home router addresses such as 192.168.1.1. You could click the links just described, or determine it yourself in the below step.
In the search type cmd and click the Command Prompt box.
In the box type in ipconfig and press enter to find your default gateway.
Enter the default gateway into the browser.
Login to the Default Gateway
Open a web browser to the gateway and type in the username and password.
This is determined at setup and might have been changed. If you aren't sure what the password is you can call your internet provider, and they can often change the password for you. By default, the Xfinity router username is admin and the password is password.
Configuring the Block
Client Parental Control Sidebar and under managed sites there is a gray button that says 'Enable'. Click that!
It should now change to green. Click Add.
Type into the URL field whichever website you wish to block on ALL machines in your house. Don't worry, we can EXCLUDE certain machines from this rule.
While you are here, switch the Always Block? To No. This will give you the time range when your child will be blocked. I set this to school hours, starting from 6AM until 3PM and excluded weekends by unchecking the checkboxes. Press SAVE when finished.
But how do you EXCLUDE your own computer from the Youtube block?
First you need to know what the computer is called. Press the Windows key + Pause key at the same time. The computer name will be halfway down the screen.
Go back to the table of Trusted computers in the web browser and flip the Trusted switch to Yes so it is green.
Comments