Hi all,
I’m getting a pc for my daughter. I’ll install Fedora KDE Spin. I’m looking for a parental control solution that also integrates with her Android phone. I’m currently using Google’s Family Link which while not great it offers enough. I’d be happy to move to any other solution that can count both device’s usage screen time as one so she doesn’t use up her phone and then move to the PC.
Any cool recommendations?
Personal opinion, I don’t understand why more parents haven’t moved to use Pi-Holes for content blocking. Since you can tailor your own blocklists, it’s not impossible to do, and I’m pretty sure some enterprising folks have already made a Pi-Hole block list for porn and various adult websites.
Further, if your child figures out how to bypass the block, they’re learning valuable skills, if nothing else.
To be fair, it seems like you’re more concerned with overall screen time, and I don’t have a better solution for that than you already have.
Pihole can be broken with a free vpn, or even just forced DNS on device.
True!
I take comfort that if my kid can figure out setting up their own VPN or DNS, then I’m sure they’ll earn enough later to support their porn habit.
I don’t know… Have you seen the rates for Findom lately!?
Run pihole with a MikroTik router at your houses demarc.
Set up firewall rules in the tik to redirect any packet with dst tcp/udp 53 outbound on wan to the pihole. If you’re worried about dns when pihole is down, create disabled rules to allow the dns traffic as well, then set up a scheduler script using if blocks to toggle the sets of rules depending on status. This will force any client on your network, even one with hardcoded dns IPs, to use the pihole.
If the client is configured for DoH you’ll just have to build out an ip block list in the MikroTik and block all known DoH IPs.
Create firewall rules to drop all vpn traffic you can, combining port based rules and similar IP lists as for DoH, but subbing in VPN provider IPs. If you want to route your home traffic over a vpn, set up a vpn client in the router itself and basically site-to-site your home to the vpn provider you use.
This would block the vast majority of kids trying to bypass parents blocks, but it’s asking quite a lot from the parents who don’t have experience configuring this stuff already.
I knew the forced dns thing because I have a pihole, and blocking port 53 traffic not heading to my two PIs has not happened yet, despite my best efforts. Shit aint simple for me, much less regular people.
Then they just do what we did when our parents wouldn’t let us watch TV. Go over to a friend’s house and do it there.
Maybe limiting internet usage is enough, spending extra time on a linux pc with no internet might just be an opportunity to learn something.
Hi again. Great idea indeed! Just use pi-hole and block all NSFW content, sites and ads.
I can’t quite get a read on if you’re being sarcastic or not, but if you are you should know that there are curated porn blocklists for pihole. This obviously won’t stop anyone from accessing porn via nsfw channels on sites that are not exclusively nsfw, like lemmy, Reddit, tumblr, or whatever.
My router can limit access time but I’m not sure if it’s on a device by device basis. Might be worth checking.