Setting up a bypass account

[thinkup]

I have changed the DNS settings on my router so that they point to OpenDNS.  I then set the filter on the highest settings so that the kids don't have access to social media and youtube on their devices.

The problem is that this prevents me from accessing YouTube as well.  How can I bypass the highest level of filter on my wife's and my devices so we can have YouTube access?

I don't want to change the DNS settings on each of the kid's devices and would prefer to keep the filtering on the router itself.  This way if their friends are over with their devices and are connected to our WiFi, they have the same restrictions in place.

I should add that I am looking for a solution that would work on all routers.

Thank you

[mattwilson9090]

There is no bypass option with the free home service. Given this scenario you would need to manually set the DNS on yours and your wife's devices to some service other than OpenDNS.

Note, doing this would preclude you from using any sort of option on the router that allows you to force all DNS traffic, regardless of settings on the device, to OpenDNS.

Also note, that if your kids have administrator access on their devices, or your kids friends have it on their devices, then they can just change DNS to whatever they want and bypass whatever settings you've configured on your router.

[thinkup]

@mattwilson9090 changing the DNS settings was something I did test but I wouldn't be able to do it long term because the kids would just use the parents laptops.  Also, I've ensured that they have no admin access on their laptops so they can't change it themselves.

Is there no option then that will allow me to have the following two features:

1.  Logs of sites visited (available with free accounts but not with Netgear router)

2.  Bypass accounts (available with Netgear router but not free OpenDNS account)

These are two good features and it seems unfortunate if you can't have both of them.  As a parent, it would be nice to have logs to see where the kids are going but then I lose the Bypass accounts.

[mattwilson9090]

No OpenDNS plan can provide you a log of sites that were visited, only a list of domain lookups that OpenDNS received and processed. It is a major difference, but a list of domain lookups can only give you *some* insight into the types of activity that are going on inside your network, not a definitive list of what sites people actually visited. Logging of internet traffic needs to be done at the local level, either with software installed on each device, or more commonly and preferably at the router level. Most consumer grade routers offer some level of this logging, but for most of the ones out there it is very basic and very minimal. Some of those routers can have their firmware replaced with 3rd party firmware, such as Toastman or DD-WRT that can give you much more extensive logging.

As I've said, bypass accounts are not available with the free OpenDNS product. You'll either need to look at one of the routers that supports LPC (I think that's only Netgear models) or one of the paid services such as Umbrella Prosumer (which unlike free OpenDNS does not protect the entire network, only specific devices) or perhaps OpenDNS VIP (I'm not certain on that since I've never used or supported it). It's also available with the more expensive "business" plans but those are generally out of the price range of most consumers unless you can find an OpenDNS partner who can sell the service to you.