For Home Use?

[clmckay]

I've downloaded, installed and seem to have Untangle working for my home network. (I'm on the internet, so I assume it's working.)

I wanted to use this to control and monitor my children's use of the internet.
We have so many devices web enabled, that trying to control them all is a bit crazy.

We have 3- PS3s, 2 XBOX 360s, 4 laptops, 3 computers, an Ipad, and 3 ipod touches.

I am a microsoft network admin by trade, so networking isn't foreign to me, but I really don't want to spend all day working and have to come home and work some more.

I decided to try this as a solution for having better control over what is permitted access at what time, and what level of access they get.

So far, things look fairly easy, although I'm wondering about apps for Untangle.

As an example, the area of the world I live in, we have one ISP, and their largest package permits 70 GB bandwidth / month, and charge $10/GB overage. With 8 of us in the house, it can quickly go higher than 70GB if we're not careful. I thought the Bandwidth control app would be a good fit, although the price tag seems a bit steep for home use.

Are there more apps available free that are not part of the standard install? Or is there an area to find apps that are priced more towards a family enviroment like I'm in, or have I just chosen a product that is way overkill for my environment?



Thanks for any and all input!

Christopher.

[sky-knight]

What Untangle offers is already cheap by industry standards. If you want nice toys, you tend to need to pay for them. Also, it would be rather impossible to prevent businesses from abusing the "low cost" license. 70GB is quite a bit of transfer for a 30 day period unless you're glued to netflix all day. I used to pull down perhaps 10gb / month, then Netflix happened and I'm over 200gb a month.

[blueshoes]

Don't forget to also use openDNS's free "family shield" for added filtering.

http://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-controls

208.67.222.123
208.67.220.123

vs the regular free OpenDNS free

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

[jcoehoorn]

You'll want the policy manager and bandwidth control apps, and if you want things to actually work for content filtering you'll need the paid web filter as well (web filter lite can't filter https traffic).

If you needed cheap, you wouldn't own so many expensive devices.

[sky-knight]

Blueshoes points out a solid alternative for content control. OpenDNS is a darn nice filter, and it's pennies compared to Untangle. It isn't quite as powerful in some ways, but for home use I've found the FREE offerings from OpenDNS to be quite powerful.