Designing your Netgear LPC security rules

There are a couple of ways to design your security set-up using Netgear Live Parental Controls (LPC). It's important to consider your options before starting or you could find that some of your devices have too much or too little freedom to do what you want.

When setting up my system, I actually got it wrong the first time and had to change it. While that was a bit of a pain, the overall amount of lost time was minimal as making changes to LPC is very straightforward.

The most important concepts are these:

1. You have a base security level for your whole home
2. You designate specific devices to have different/special security levels

The trick is that for step 2 you need to use Netgear Genie, a piece of software that runs on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

So let's step through 2 approaches...

Default Closed

I think that this is most people's default approach to security. Lock the whole thing down and then just allow individuals to do what they need on an approval basis.

In this scenario we:

1. Make the default network very secure (few or no permissions by default).
2. Allow specific devices to have lower security.

So let's say we have a family with 2 Adults and 2 Children (look, just like mine!). They each have 1 device and there's also a SmartTV in the house (or Sky+ box, Playstation, Wii, XBox, or other media streaming device). We want the Adults to have full Access and the Children to have limited access.

Here's what it looks like...

So this is working pretty well. The whole network is shut down and the children and adults are given appropriate permissions using Netgear Genie. The only potential challenge is that the SmartTV is restricted using the house defaults. If you want to ensure that your kids can't watch particular types of content on this device, that's great. If you want to be able to watch content freely on this device, it's not great.

Also, if you have a guest come to visit, they'll automatically inherit the closed default network unless you install Netgear Genie on their device and configure it for Child or Adult access.

This is how I initially set up my network. I realised its limitations pretty quickly and switched to the next option...

Default Open

Here we keep the overall network open and then lock down specific devices. Specifically:

1. Make the default network very open (none or few limitations by default).
2. Lock down specific devices to have higher security.

Same scenario with 2 Adults and 2 Children. This time it looks like this:

Here the Children and Adults end up with the same capabilities but any other devices on the network are automatically open. So streaming media will continue to work and any house guests will be able to access the Internet without hitting blocks.

Summary

The reality here is that Netgear LPC is totally dependent on Netgear Genie being installed on a device in order to establish an exception on the network. If you can't install Netgear Genie, then that device must use the default security of the network.

So if you have 2 SmartTVs, one in the Adult's room and one in the Children's, they can't have different security settings. Period.

This is a limitation of the system, but probably only a small one.

I'm using the Default Open setting at my house and it's working just fine.