Updates to firewall - and Mobile for HomePro

Hey all, I'm new to Untangle and really enjoying it.

I am an IT professional specializing in managed IT services. I like to dabble at home as much as possible to try and stay up on tech and help me better prepare myself for technical conversations with customers.

I've recently installed Untangle in effort to try and subvert some nefarious behavior from a sleep over last weekend. My nephew stayed over on Saturday night and he decided that it would be a good idea to get up at 5am with my son and play games. They are 9. This wasn't acceptable by any far stretch of our parenting practices. My nephew has continued to do things like this for years. Some harmless behavior, some not.

I put sophos UTM in about a month ago with the thought that I could control and see things a lot better, only to find out that sophos has a non-existent reporting platform and administration is cumbersome.

I tried Untangle and was immediately hooked. It's easy and effective.

The reason I laid the context above is to represent a particular use case for a feature request.

I was attempting to harden my network and made my kids policies quite restrictive, in that process, I inadvertently shut down a few things that were unintentional, like google updates on their tablets, and xbox updates. I'm sure there are many other things that have been limited that I will soon discover.

It was a huge pain to get that sorted and it took me a while to get into the reports and figure out what needed to be opened up/allowed.

It would be handy to setup a couple of things.
1. Have a mobile phone/tablet app/email that would allow for the admin to receive the breach (internal to external request only) where you have the ability to implement a hole in the firewall for the request. IE. if we are trying to update fortnite on the xbox and it errors out, receive a notification that would give me the ability to allow (one time), add to policy, or add to user etc... I want to avoid sitting there looking at logs to try and figure out what happened. I would like to have them submit something and "approve" it.
2. Ability to look at firewall blocks and quickly allow. Use case, I am doing microsoft updates and it fails, there are 10 different IP's and ports that need to be allowed in order to let the updates happen.. huge pain. Can we simplify?

This isn't a request for all, this is a request for home users. This isn't a use case for corporate environments.

Thanks Untangle! I really am enjoying your product vs. sophos, quite a difference.

Thanks!

I'd love to see some of this too, the problem is what you're asking for is magic.

You can solve most of this by using Web Filter, instead of the firewall. I have a very restrictive after hours web filter configured, that my kids' computers are subject to at night, during the day they have access to a different webfitler that's more open. Heck I've even got a special subset of rules that apply specifically to 1 child because she's particularly stubborn.

Read up on the policy manager, I think you'll find you already have what you need. Here in 2019, you do not need the firewall module, that's the last place you want to be working with any sort of policy based content control

Again you need policy manager, and web filter! :D And once you get your brain around that, you'll finally be using the UTM, instead of thinking of firewalls. It's kinda sad that all the other products out there that claim to be UTMs, still are just layer 3 devices with some layer 7 toys tagged on. Untangle isn't like this, it's a layer 7 platform, with some layer 2 and layer 3 toys tagged on. This requires a rethink... a big one!

IF you've got homepro, you've got Policy Manager, again start there: https://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/Policy_Manager

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