5. Parental Control

The Parental Control top level menu (Figure 12) has five sub menus and a global on/off toggle. The first sub-menu that I started playing with was Categories (Figure 13). Just for fun, I set the DSD-150 to block comics and instant messaging, clicked "Save" and then tested these changes by going to web browsers on my two test systems.

Figure 12: Parental Control screen (click to enlarge)

To test for comic blocking, I chose www.dilbert.com. But to my surprise, Dilbert came right up! So I power cycled the DSD-150 to see if that made a difference. And then disaster struck...my XP system went back to being unable to access the Internet. (Everything was fine and Dilbert was properly blocked on my Mac OS system.)

Figure 13: Parental Control Categories screen (click to enlarge)

After checking the usual suspects, I called D-Link support who stepped me through resetting the DSD-150's configuration to factory defaults. To do this, point your web browser to the DSD-150's IP address, log in as "admin" with no password and click on the Admin left-hand menu selection to get to the web page shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14: DSD-150 Admin screen (click to enlarge)

The D-Link tech support person had me click "Reset Configuration" and then in XP, click on the task bar thin client and "Reauthenticate". That returned access to the Internet from the XP machine after a few minutes, this time with Dilbert properly blocked. The lesson I learned from this exercise was that if you've made a change, but it doesn't appear to be in effect at a client, then re-authenticate! Don't power cycle the DSD-150.