[support]

By a) do you mean to keep OpenDNS current with your public IP address assigned by AT&T? If so, no specific setup is needed beyond setting up Dynamic DNS on the pcWRT. And that’s needed only if you use OpenDNS Home instead of OpenDNS Family Shield.

For b), you can usually set up the pcWRT as a DMZ host in the AT&T router. Refer to our blog post here for reference: https://www.pcwrt.com/2017/01/configure-att-nvg510-dmzbridge-to-the-pcwrt/. I think the setup should be similar.

[support]

Yes. By default all in bound traffic is blocked. You use the port forwarding section in Network Settings to allow outside requests to reach specific hosts on your home network.

[support]

Each device belongs to one profile. If a device is not specifically assigned to a profile, then it belongs to the Default profile.

Devices assigned to the “restricted” profile will have Internet access between 6:00pm and 9:00pm. They will not have access outside the window. Since these devices are assigned to the “restricted” profile, policies defined in other profiles will not have effect on them. When they have access, OpenDNS may allow or deny a web site depending on the settings defined there.

For the third profile, you are right. Internet access is allowed around the clock, except the sites listed in the block list, which are blocked around the clock.

Maybe you can let us know what you want to achieve, so that we make suggestions about how to achieve that.

[support]

WiFi speeds vary greatly depending on how close you are to the router. RF interference from other devices, such as other routers in the house and neighbor’s routers, also affect WiFi performance.

Since your Internet speed is 100Mbps, the effects of parental control is also visible. With parental control turned on for all devices, some of our users reported top speeds in the range of 45-50Mbps over WiFi. You can put some devices in profiles with parental control turned off, to avoid the ceiling brought on by parental control.

You may try to select different WiFi channels for the router to see if you get any speed gains.

Since you have a high speed router already, you can piggy back the pcWRT to the existing router, so that you have two WiFi networks, one for you and one for the kids. Have the kids connect to the pcWRT with the benefits of parental controls.

[support]

Thanks! We should be able to come up with an update to fix this in the next few days.

[support]

The phones are blocked by the Calendar. How many calendars were created? Did you list any sites in the calendars?

[support]

Instead of rebooting your Arris cable modem, can you try unplugging the WAN Ethernet cable and reconnect? Let us know if that works. That helps us to understand the nature of the problem.

[support]

Try this: in the profile where the ipod belongs, disable “Block literal IP addresses” and “Block proxy, VPN, TOR”.

[support]

You may try to block www.google.com (without the leading http://) instead of google.com. Gmail can be accessed via mail.google.com.

[support]

The router syncs time with NTP servers, so time should always be current. One possibility is that your Verizon G1100 router blocks the outbound NTP port. You might want to check the firewall settings on your G1100. Outbound UDP port 123 should be allowed in order for NTP sync to work.

[support]

Most likely you are blocked by a Calendar, or a blacklist if there is one. If you ignore the warning and go ahead to load the page, you’ll see the reason. If you are blocked by a Calendar and it should not be, please check the time on the router.

[support]

OpenDNS uses a technology called Anycast to provide fast DNS service with redundancy. The IP addresses you use are the Anycast addresses. The DNS requests, after they are received, are routed to the backend, which uses unicast addresses to query downstream DNS servers. Those DNS servers will see different IP addresses. I guess Google works pretty much the same way.

For more info: https://blog.opendns.com/2013/01/10/high-availability-with-anycast-routing/

[support]

When parental control is enabled, DNS lookup is forced to go through the server IPs selected for the profile. Maybe your Macbook Pro doesn’t like that.

Did you try setting the Macbook Pro DNS server to the pcWRT router IP address (and omit the secondary DNS server)?

You may also try to look at what DNS server the Macbook Pro is really using by loading this URL in your browser: http://myresolver.com. Of course you have to disable parental control at the router level in order to do that. Then change the DNS servers for the router (on the Internet Settings page), and see if that has any effect on the DNS server actually used by the Macbook Pro.

Keep the DNS server setting on the Macbook Pro point to the pcWRT router while you do these tests.

[support]

Does it work when you have the Macbook Pro in the default profile, where parental control is disabled?

[support]

@venfam Great to hear it worked out for you!

Please also note that parental control works only when devices are connected to the pcWRT. There’s no filtering when kids are connected to your existing router.

It’s preferable to turn off the WiFi on your existing router to make it easier. Sometimes two WiFi signals cause RF interference with each other, and may degrade WiFi performance. If you do need two WiFi signals, make sure the channels don’t overlap (i.e., at least two channels apart).

[Author]

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