General Use Question

[rozzirat]

I opened an account after reading a forum response on Verizon about parental controls.  I wanted to block certain devices from being used at certain times and there was a discussion about how it slowed the router down considerably when you add rules, so someone suggested Open DNS.  Now that I am on it I see you can't manage the individual IP addresses of your devices just the router itself - which would mean that I get blocked as well as my child - so I would have be aware of that.  I'm thinking this is not what I am looking for - am I understanding this correctly?

[mattwilson9090]

That's generally correct, yes. OpenDNS Home (the free version) is not aware of individual devices on your network, only the network as a whole. Which means that all devices on your network that use OpenDNS will have the same configuration.

If you don't want a device to use your OpenDNS configuration just configure it to use a different service. Just be aware that this is an all or nothing thing, you're either using OpenDNS on a device or not.

Paid versions of the service do however have ways that you can manage settings for individual devices. In most cases you'd need to install agent software in order to get individual settings for a specific device.

Another option are Netger routers with LPC (Live Parental Controls). With one of those you would still leverage OpenDNS and have the option to apply different configurations to different devices.

[rotblitz]

@rozzirat

"Now that I am on it I see you can't manage the individual IP addresses of your devices just the router itself - ... - am I understanding this correctly?"

No, you don't understand it correctly.  OpenDNS is effective only on the devices where it is configured.  If you configure it on the router, then the whole network can be covered, but you can configure another DNS service on particular devices, as mattwilson9090 said.  Or you don't configure OpenDNS on the router, but only on those devices which should use it, e.g. your child's.

[rozzirat]

Thank you Matt and Ro - I appreciate your responses.  I understand - will continue to work on this with your input in mind.