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Down To Earth Networking Help and Tips for The Home Networking User

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Secure Home Networks Set Up The Easy Way

Secure home networks is sort of the opposite of what I showed you in the computer networking ports forwarding, where I showed you how to open up different ports to the outside world.

Here I show you how to restrict access to the Internet for a securing your home network. Now there are lots of other issues dealing with security covered on this web site but this is mainly for security within your home network or local area network.

Secure home networking is useful if you want to make sure that people on your network aren’t using certain services or say if you are a parent and you want a secure home network by restricting access to the internet because lets say you don’t want your children surfing the web after a certain time or to certain inappropriate sites.

All this can be set up this up through your computer network router.

And most have this capability but it seems to be a little known secret among many, in fact a lot of people don't know that they're there and don't put them to use. Instead they find the,selves making another purchase that could have easily been resolved with the purchase they already made when they purchased a router.

Secure home networks cans even save some money. Just follow these simple instructions and you can get a secure home network in less than 15 minutes!

Again for my example, I will show you how to get a secure home network by using the Linksys router, your may be a little different but not much. If you have problem locating it, just view one of our other pages on the subject or email through the contact us page and I will do my best to answer it for you.

So once again we log into the router's web page now go to “Access Restrictions”. You might have to sniff around a little bit on your router set up page to see where you have to go but most have this sort of capability.

Here in access restrictions page, you have all you need for a secure home network; you have an area for Internet policies and on the right it says that you can have up to 10 network policies set up. So you can set up all kinds of rules depending on your needs.

In this case I am starting with the first policy.

Under the status section you enable this particular policy by clicking enable. Then it asks for a policy name and since you want to restrict it for the children, you might call it school nights.

Next I have to tell the router which PC (s) will be affected by this rule. So click the edit PC's list button which will display a list you can choose how to identify those different PCs. Since you want to restrict access to the kids in this example, you will need to have their IP address, if you are not sure how to get this take a look at my network basics page from the navigation bar,

In this example, we know their computer IP addresses end in 104 and 105. And maybe your computer ends in 106 but you will give yourself full access at all times because you are the grown-up. ;-)

But if you want to restrict the kids you put their IP addresses under the section that says "Enter the IP addresses of the PCs. Or if you have a range of computer you can enter the beginning range and the ending range if you have several computers in your home network that you want to restrict.

Now you also have the option of identifying the computer with what is called the Mac address. The MAC address is a unique address that each network interface card has. We will look at that more in the wireless security section.

So because you have made some changes, you will need to save settings now. When they are complete, you will get the window that says it's successful, click continue, close that window and now the rules that I set up will only affect the computers I listed above.

Next you can choose what you want to do with those computers you just chose, do you want to deny or allow Internet access or what ever other service you want to allow or deny. For our example we are restricting access so choose the deny options first. After that you choose which day of the weeks you want this restrictions to go into affect.

So in our example, you want a secure home network on school nights and so you will deny access to the internet on Sunday through Thursday. So all you do is click each of those boxes so that they show a check mark in them. And since Friday and Saturday are not school nights, and you want to let them stay on the Internet as long as they want, don't do anything with those boxes.

Now when setting up your secure home network, you can even restrict by times, you can choose 24 hours and you can restrict access to the internet 24 hours a day Sunday through Thursday. Or if you feel that is too harsh, you can choose from any range of time you would like. In my example I chose 8 p.m. to 11:55 p.m.

Secure home network is setup here so that you have Sunday through Thursday the kid's computers will be denied Internet access from 8 p.m. to just before midnight.

So leave those settings the way they are and don’t forget to click save settings. Click continue once you are successful at your changes and now you see the first policy listed there is the one you just named. You can go on to great nine more anytime you like.

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Secure home networks is easy because you restricted every service available during the days and times you chose above. But let's say you wanted to at least allow then to check email after 8 P.M. for example. All you have to do is by choosing to allow certain Internet services.

If I wanted to restrict web access I can block HTTP or even the a secure HTTPS connection. If there other services you wanted to add I just keep click the add button until you are satisfied. But we won cover that in this lesson.

So what you have set up here now is from eight at night to almost midnight the children will still be able to get onto the Internet but at eight o'clock, web services will be shut down. They will still be a good to check e-mail but not surf the Web.

Secure home networks offers you some other options like blocking by URL addresses, this is a restriction to a specific web site, you just type in this fields and you can block by keywords also if certain keywords (you know which ones we're talking about), you can type those words in there. But this is a PG web site so I won't be typing them in here.

So we save those settings and click continue

Secure home networking has been set up by simply using your router to restrict access. Now some brands actually have subscription services that you can pay to be a part of and choose to through the router software to choose whether to allow access to these sites or not. So check with the router set up software or web site to see if they offer that kind of service if you are interested in it.

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