Possible to use two routers and two DNS servers?

[nealonious]

I have an Arris modem and Linksys ea3500 router that works reasonably well from a performance standpoint but is insufficient for monitoring/restricting purposes. I bought a pcwrt router for the monitoring aspect.

I originally thought I would remove the Linksys router and put the whole family on the pcwrt but have a sense after looking through the opendns log files that figuring out what sites to blacklist for restricted activity is difficult. I see domains like a-0011.a-msedge.net, aa.akgn.com, and x.bidswitch.net and have no idea if these are harmless, malicious, or part of gaming/video sites that I would like to restrict during the week. Given the hundreds of domains listed for a single day I can’t imagine going through these one by one.

One alternative I want to consider is to keep both routers and have the pcwrt router connected to opendns servers and use the opendns broad categories to restrict games/videos during the week for kids’ devices and have the parents use the Linksys router with, say Google’s DNS servers.

Is it possible to have different DNS servers through two different routers through a single home network? Is there a simpler way to achieve what I am asking, e.g. opendns will allow two sets of category restrictions from a single network?

Currently I have connected the devices with Ethernet cables as Pcwrt -> Linksys -> Arris with opendns DNS for pcwrt and the Google DNS servers for Linksys (entered 8.8.8.8. and 8.8.4.4. as DNS servers). I do seem to be able to connect to internet through both routers but the opendns restrictions don’t seem to work when I am connected to pcwrt. It isn’t clear if the opendns servers are being accessed.

I hope this is relatively clear – I am not too experienced with this. Thanks for any help you can provide.

[support]

If I understand correctly, what you are trying to achieve is this:
1. Use OpenDNS to filter contents accessed by children.
2. Use a different DNS service, such as Google DNS, for parents to bypass the OpenDNS filtering.

You can achieve the above with the pcWRT router alone.

1. Create two profiles, one for children and one for parents.
2. In the first profile, select OpenDNS in the DNS server dropdown.
3. Assign children’s devices to the first profile. If it is the Default profile, then skip this step.
4. In the second profile, select Google Public DNS in the DNS server dropdown.
5. Assign parent’s devices to the second profile.

To check that OpenDNS worked for devices in the first profile, follow the steps here (on a device connected to the first profile): http://www.pcwrt.com/2016/08/how-to-test-whether-or-not-your-opendns-settings-are-working/.

[nealonious]

Thank you – this seems to work and address my concerns.

This may be a configuration option you may want to make more well known. When kids have one or two sites parents would like to restrict it is easy enough to enter those domain names in a profile. However, as kids get older and the list of sites and categories grows, it may be easier to have opendns restrict broad categories of sites, say during homework/weekday hours. Just a suggestion.

Now, if you had a product that could get them to complete their homework and chores more carefully…

Thanks again

[Author]

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