Modern parenting -> MikroTik Kid Control

After spending the last two years being the living alarm clock and “go to bed reminder” for my daughter i decided to put a technical solution to it.

using MikroTik hardware since more than 10 years now, its pretty easy to do, just add a forward rule that matched the mac:id and drops the traffic based on a time, easy eh.

But this way does require to make a rule for each device, and the randomized mac:id’s, which will turn this into babysitting ipchains over babysitting my daughter 😉

Say hello to “Kid Control” a system that does exactly that, you can define rules in terms of bandwith limits and times, and those rulesets will also serve as a mac:id address list, the rules are negatively oriented, so i just added 24/7 as limited times with 15km/s data limit.

and then set exceptions to this selecting the times where this rules overrides.

this results in dynamic ipchain/firewall rules created by RouterOS

Doing this was quite confusing, as the way its done is a bit different than the rest of the RouterOS, so here is how:

1. go to IP->Kid Control
2. Add a new “kid”
3. in all the “day fields” (Mon-Sun) add the full day with no interruption.
   like this 00:00:00-1d 00:00:00
4. set a bandwith limit (somethings extremly slow like 5-15k)
   this is important as a total disconnect will cause Microsaft Windows to disconnect the wlan, having a tiny bit of traffic will stop this.
5. then add the “free times” in the fields “Unlimited Rate Mon” below for each day, basically the times where the internet is allowed.
   i have it as example between 5am and 9:40pm exept on weekends (friday and saturday)
   5am-9pm will looke like this 00:00:00-21:00:00
6. apply and click OK
7. click on the tab “devices”
   this tabe also shows what all the clients are doing, which can be very handy for other things, this actually did show my that one of my cameras constantly calling home to china, (resulting in the role on the screenshoot above)
8. look for a dynamic entry of the device your Kid is using, click on it, and copy the MAC Address
   
9. close it, then click “add New”
10. add the MAC Address and a Name and choce the user you just created
    
11. that’s it. this will assign the mac to the mac-list and the slowing down will instantly work,
    pretty neat eh?