You probably won’t need to change anything at the router’s advanced setup. However, if you want to limit Internet access from certain computers, that’s the place to go. Also, if you play online games or use a P2P application, you should open the ports used by your software here, or the router will block your program from connecting the Internet. On advance setup you will also find security-specific options, which we will be talking about on the next page.

On our router, we can limit Internet access based on time on Advanced Setup, Firewall, Client Filtering. For blocking all computers from browsing during business hours, for instance, we could block all IP addresses from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.255.255, port 80 (which means www) and then configure weekdays and times to allow or block access. Since the configuration allows you to specify a port number, you can also block e-mail (ports 25 and 110) or even instant messengers like MSN Messenger (port 1863). A good place to get port information for several applications is http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~rakerman/port-table.html.

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Figure 17: Blocking access based on weekday and hour.

We could even block certain computers from having any kind of Internet access, on Firewall, MAC control. There you can enter the MAC address from the computer you want to block from having any kind of Internet access. This computer will continue to have access to other resources located inside your network, like shared folders and printers.

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Figure 18: Blocking access based on MAC address.

If you have special software that uses non-standard ports, you should open the ports on the router, or your program won’t be able to access the Internet. This is true for P2P programs and games. You should look for the ports the program uses on its manual and open its ports at NAT, Special Application. On our example on Figure 19, our router has Overnet (a P2P software) ports open. Learn more about this reading our How To Make P2P Programs to Work on Networks Using a Broadband Router tutorial

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Figure 19: Opening non-standard ports.