Hi all,
I have 5 kids at home, including 3 teens who massively use wifi access with smartphones, laptops and ipod touch...
When googling the net few years ago, I've discovered the DD-WRT and OpenWrt solutions, but neither of them seemed able to answer my need : put quota on the kids internet access.
And this year, I discovered the Gargoyle solution, especially from the review of these websites :
-
raisedbyturtles
-
the-gadgeteer
-
bikemike
[this allowed me to discover that in France we are really lucky to have ISP offers with unlimited data allowed, for only 30€ a month... on the contrary of countries like Australia, New-Zeland, Great-Britain and others...]
I bought a second-hand
Netgear WNDR4300v1, for the comfortable amount of memory and the unbrickable feature (u-boot boot manager) it has.
I began to try the Gargoyle version 1.9.0 with many plugin (AdBlock, Spectrum analyzer, ping watchdog, webshell, logread, ...).
I tried it for two weeks with the Netgear used as a test router (the ISP router remaining the main home router) , but it was unstable, ie it restarts itself after a few hours of use.
Then I put the last stable version, the 1.8.1.
When I tried to restore the configuration previously backed up with 1.9.0, it results in a crash of the router (it resets just after the startup, in loop).
I tried PuTTY and WinSCP but I did'nt succeed in regaining control. No ping was available during bootmode.
Fortunately I succeeded to flash a firmware in failsafe mode, using TFTP and helped with the following :
-
http://www.gargoyle-router.com/wiki/dok ... e_recovery
-
https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wn ... lsafe_mode
It's now working with v1.8.1 since two months with no reset and I'm really happy with the features provided by this alternative firmware, with a lot of options and potential.
For now, I use Wifi schedule, NTP, OpenDNS, AdBlock, QoS (basic default settings) and Firewall restrictions features. I'm looking to use QoS with more accuracy rules for my gamer son.
I'm interested in the new features "Known devices & Devices groups" of the next version 1.9.x.
I will try to help to define specifications for a Time quota feature (described
here and
here), in which I'm very interested.
Thanks for your work to all the participants and developers of this great project !
I have few time to tests
ispyisail new versions in development and I need to have a full operational router at home, but I can help to translate interface in French if needed (I've seen that
lyrz did a great job
here).
Frederic