+ THE REAL WORLD GUIDE TO PARENTAL CONTROLS on the VR900

I thought I should add to this for anyone else who experiences the frustration I did with the Parental Controls on the Archer VR900. Again, they are simply not easy to interpret. You think it's all fairly obvious but it really isn't. I spent half a day trouble shooting this so hopefully my experience will save others hassle.

Firstly, find the device on your network which you want to add to Parental Controls. To do so you need to be in Parental Controls and to switch ON the button at the top (switch to the right side to be on).

Then click ADD and VIEW EXISTING DEVICES. Select the device you want to time control. The router does not always show you all connected devices (no idea why not) in which case you will need to find your device's MAC address. On an android tablet/phone it's under settings >> about phone (or tablet) >> status. Add the Device name and MAC address to the entry fields. Double check you got the MAC address correctly entered. A mistake here will mean it will not work.

Now select the small green CLOCK ICON on this same pop up screen and then select (make the blocks green) for all the hours and days you want to RESTRICT access to the internet (it will affect all IP traffic to and from the device, not just the web access). Select the OK button to return to the previous dialogue with your device name and MAC.

On this screen make sure that the ENABLE tick box is ticked and then select OK.

You are now back at the main Parental Controls page... You are almost done but this next step is critical...

>>> This is the important part and where I was going wrong at every turn... You MUST now check the WHITELIST checkbox on the main screen and hit SAVE <<<

THINGS TO WATCH OUT FOR

The PC controls are clearly using some complex underlying boolean logic. This would be fine IF it was clear exactly how to enable and disable the logic. However, right now it is not. When you subsequently disable the Parental Control feature DO NOT ASSUME that this means it is now working as before. I found that if I disabled the Parental Control feature (green button at the top of the main PC page) then switching it back on did not automatically work? It may be there is a time lag between re-enabling and seeing it working again? I did not have hte time to check.

In the end I selected all my Devices entered under Parental Controls and selected the SAVE button again whilst the radio button was on WHITELIST. For me this seemed to kick-in the feature into action again.

So, unless you need to enable/disable PC regularly, avoid messing with the feature once you have it working.

Lastly, be careful with the black/white list feature. It does not seem to apply per device but universally. In the end I removed all entries and am relying instead on a combination of OpenDNS to control specific domain/content access and Parental Controls to limit the times that the devices can be used to access the internet.

Hope this is of help to others.

Cheers

Ralph