Why Gargoyle for my 3700?

[tals]

On the parental controls, I never tried the stock firmware - literally just put gargoyle on as I bought the router specifically for qos as family was in Internet meltdown

The controls you have in gargoyle:
Very flexible time limits, so for instance it's exam time daughter is at home so we sat down and worked out during her day when she could have breaks etc, all other time internet access but not LAN access is unavailable. In evening Internet goes off for sons and daughters devices at bed time. At the same time you can whitelist aspects of the internet like school pages, wki etc that continue to work.I did for a brief time turn search and Internet monitoring on for them - basically meant I could see any search they did and what pages they were doing. I showed them and then turned it off without telling them but the capability is there.

You also can see what each persons bandwidth is and if you want you can set amount of bandwidth per hour/day/week and then have it either throttle right down or turn off fully.

What It doesn't have is a restriction to types of pages through something like opendns, you can force the dns through opendns and they won't be able to change it but unless opendns stops it then they will still be able to access the content - not sure if it is netgear or opendns that does this? That said you will then have the opendns records.

I did this post in another forum when I first got gargoyle with screenshots etc which gives some of what I do with gargoyle
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showth ... t=18351858

[skier150]

Basically I would like to restrict all access things kids should not be doing on the internet. Like any kind of "adult" material, or drugs, etc. With the standard built in stuff you have to put a term in to stop people from seeing it on the internet. The OpenDNS controls allow you to chose an entire category to block or restrict, so it will catch many more terms than I can ever enter into the router FW. All of the controls are set on the OpenDNS website under my account. Then I just use the provided DNS server numbers in the router setup, and it all works. What I like the best is that I setup bypass accounts for my wife and I, so if we want to go to a restricted place on the internet, we just load a quick and log in. I asked OpenDNS if they supported any other routers, and they told me the only ones that they work like this with is Netgear. They are starting a deal with D-Link, but the service will not be as configurable as the Netgear one. So... I have no idea if it is in the FW, or if it just looks to make sure I have a supported router and lets me use it, or if it is all tied into the DNS numbers... or a combination of all of the above. I tried to use several other parental control programs, but they all have to be installed on each device to work. The OpenDNS one covers any device connected to the network.

From your setup it looks like Gargoyle can really do a lot with bandwidth. That is something I never messed with in the stock FW. I went from 5 to 10 a couple of months ago, but I am still having issues with some lag and overburdening the up channel. Unfortunately with the 10 I only get 800k up. But I have been blaming the router, and probably more specifically the lousy FW it has had since the start. I am about ready to just buy a new router and upgrade to the 15 line, which as 2 up. But, I really wanted to give this thing every chance possible... which is how I found this site; in a search for different FW.

[tals]

Regarding the opendns parental controls, I don't think the netgear is doing anything clever with this - if you have a Screenies from the netgear control page I could take a look. If is the case yes you can setup the router to go through opendns and you can stop the clients changing this to another DNs server. The router also supports dynamic dns through opendns login.

I may actually take a look at it myself as it looks quite neat!

[tals]

If you leave it with me I'm happy to set this up for me and also see if I can stop some devices being monitored etc. I'll post probably Monday with an update?

[skier150]

So, what I do is to go netgear.opendns.com and log in to get this page, then I can set the restrictions. The bypass accounts are the ones I wrote about for my wife and I to get unrestricted access.

Here is a pic from the config page... there are more categories at the bottom, but you get the idea.

http://getapc.com/pics/netgpcod.jpg

[tals]

Ok the content filtering side that is basically opendns, the ability to categorise users that is netgear and also specifying by time is netgear. You maybe able to that with the opendns VIP option but I need to post on the opendns forums for some clarifications, as i can see a great advantage in setting categories per person but not if it's a blanket rule.

So at this point if you moved to gargoyle, you would keep the content filtering for the network but lose being able to have each device filtered differently.

I will however do further digging to see if it is possible, this will take longer as its dependant on the opendns forums

[skier150]

I had asked OpenDNS if I could get the same type of coverage in any way with a different router, and thy said no. Not even their pay account can replicate what they provided through the Netgear setup. I asked them last night if their service would work in a supported Netgear router, but running a third party FW... I am awaiting a reply.

[tals]

I had asked OpenDNS if I could get the same type of coverage in any way with a different router, and thy said no. Not even their pay account can replicate what they provided through the Netgear setup. I asked them last night if their service would work in a supported Netgear router, but running a third party FW... I am awaiting a reply.

I don't think it will as it's a netgear extra - I suspect Netgear invested into this to make it what it is.

I am going to ask the question from the perspective of how I could use it if I used opendns - ie without the categories of family member it's not very useful imho and lets see what that produces

With that in mind I still think Gargoyle will be a much better bet - but this aspect you will lose, though you can monitor what they are doing -but thats more after the event than stopping it. All the other stuff is absolutely rock solid.

In terms of changing back - it maybe worth posting a seperate post re how easy it is - I am fairly sure if it is no good you literally reload the netgear firmware (could be worth searching the forums as I am sure I have seen a post!)

[skier150]

Thanks for all your input and help!

Unfortunately all I have found are tffp command line instructions, have not found anything different yet.

[tals]

As we thought it's a netgear 'add in' that makes the categorisation possible. Now you could point the pcs which you want covered at opendns and all the others at a non opendns. Though if they have any semblance of IT it would be trivial to change this. Gargoyle can force you to all use a specified dns but then you would be stuck with the same controls as your children.

A possible enhancement could be for Gargoyle to have the ability to set IP addresses to DNS server but not sure that is something the devs would do.

So if this is critical then either you can go gargoyle and all have the same or you can't go gargoyle.

Personally having experienced Gargoyle I would never now go back, I have a very stable network and connection to the internet for all the users

** their is a bypass ability for blocked pages but that is believed to be the pay for option