One for the tech guys out there in Briskoda land:

I have a home network, with several PC's connecting to a Wireless-n Netgear ADSL router, which currently acts as the DHCP host etc. On the router I can assign fixed IP's to the MAC addresses of the various attached devices, but in the schedule/Firewall sections, I can only effectively have 2 rules. 1 is Internet always on for a certain IP range, and the other is timed access for the remainder range. I cannot have more than this.

One of the PC's attached is used as a server (although only running Windows XP SP2) for data backups, print serving etc.

My question is, can I disable DHCP on the router, and use the server for DHCP, with some more sophisticated (but cheap) software on the server that will control internet access for all the other PC's (and X-Box 360 and Wii) on an individual basis?

I have trawled the internet but not found anything suitable, or it is way too expensive...

You can certainly run a DHCP service on your server to replace the one on your router, but I'm not sure how this will help you. All DHCP does is assign IP addresses to client machines.

The thing that is controlling Internet access is the firewall in your router, and simply relocating the DHCP service will not affect this.

You could use a PC to act as your router but you're into serious geek territory at that point.

What exactly do you want to do? We may be able to suggest a solution...

If you want certain ports to go to certain machines, you want to leave DHCP and the firewall on and use Port Forwarding.

This will let you forward the ports you want and will probably be under the NAT section in the router.

Have a look through your routers manuals, or post a model number up here, and see if the firewall is a stateful packet inspection (SPI) firewall or just a NAT `firewall` (Not a real firewall at all).

HTH

Individually controlled access for all the machines is a bit tricky. If it was just web access (rather than other Internet services), I'd suggest some sort of proxy on the server (winproxy?) if that does timed access, with the PCs set to proxy through it. However, for full control you'll need more than that. One of the linux-based PC routers will do it: PFSense for example, or IPCop with an advanced proxy add on. You'll struggle to do this with a netgear though.

SPI Firewall such as on Draytek or XyZel will do individual controll just fine.

Cheers for the replies guys. The Netgear has SPI as far as I can see, and I could set up port forwarding etc., but the underlying issue of individual control over each PC's ability to use the Internet is the main problem. I had hoped that there might be something reasonably straightforward out there I could put on the 'Server', but alas it seems not! I am not quite geeky enough to go down the Linux route so looks like I might be stuffed!

The DHCP bit might be a red herring, but that is how I control things currently. The basics are that I want to be able to control separately how several different devices attach to the Net, and more importantly, when, all from one machine, rather than software on each device that can be circumvented by reasonably tech savvy sons !!

The linux firewall on a PC isn't hard- if you can set up a windows server you can set up IPcop with AdvProxy. The only real issue is having to run it on a PC 24-7.

Hard code each PC's IP address, then you can apply firewall rules based on NATed IP's

eg nothing at all except port 80/443 (Http/Https) to one machine and everything to the others.

You can certainly do this on the draytek and ZyXel Routers.

As CJB said doing the linux thing isn't difficult, but you ideally want a spare IP. Another issue is that you have to then keep that PC up to date also so it doesn't get attacked.

strange... my Netgear router gives me complete control over that?