Hi guys,
I am trying to overcome a problem that we are having with our kids at home and school when using our windows 10 laptops.
I have all of the systems setup such that our kids are restricted to my microsoft family admin account, however, they still seem to be able to regularly get around the microsoft family parental controls…accessing restricted content, and even browsing the web outside of time contraints.
Another issue is that i have disabled the ability to download software and also restricted google chrome, and yet i find dozens of downloads of games and also google chrome browser has been installed on my sons laptop!
I was wondering, if i were to setup and configure my own private virtualmin name servers, and then from my windows 10 administrator account, configure the windows10 machines to only use my nameservers, would this be a reasonably efficient way of controlling both internet content and also time limitations for internet access?
This is certainly a way to go about making sure you have a bit more control, but I wouldn’t recommend Virtualmin in this case.
Virtualmin uses bind as authoritative, whilst you need a recursive DNS. It’s possible to setup of course, but I never tried. This approach would mean a lot of manual work maintaining blacklists and so on
Go for a readymade solution instead! Set up a raspberry pi or something with either AdGuard Home or Pi-Hole and tweak that to block the sites you need. AdGuard is a bit more powerful with features like safesearch and so on, but either are fantastic solutions to use at home.
For an easy start without extra hardware, you could try AdGuard DNS in your router or individual laptops. That along with Windows access controls and user/group policies should help you get a handle on most kinds of mischief.
I like the simple crudeness of unified hosts files for blocking other crudeness. I’ve always wanted to take it to the next level with a pi-hole. The setup seems intracate, especially if a PC is used instead of a Raspberry, but I’m sure it’s worth it.