Grounded

I’m sure that we’ve all been there. Our kiddo is being a pain in the butt and we’ve used the phrase that we know we’ll get attention. All screens are going to go away. I know…first world punishment here. But kids and their devices are pretty connected at all times. Or at least want to be connected. This is my journey of locking down the network to make sure that a device on my network could be black holed from their favorite spots.

Ideal solution

Ideally, I wanted to be able to identify his device and basically knock it off the network. I could do this via the command line and some FW rules to the DNS server. But this would take a bit and I wanted a way that another person could do this easily from a webpage or maybe some other automation down the road.

My home network is basically a cable modem, some 1G switches and Unifi APs at various points in the house. PI-hole serves up both DHCP and does ad blocking for the entire network. I was hoping that the Unifi admin interface would have an easy way of blocking some clients but I did not see anything in their new admin console that allowed me to easily block them off. Their old one had it, but the new one seems to have dropped that functionality.

Pi-hole I hoped would be my savior her My home network is advanced in that it has some nicer gear run