Free PC Support

[texacoal]

I wonder if anyone can help I'm pretty new to wireless routers, I have 1 PC hard wired and 3 laptops acessing the internet via my belkin wireless router, what I need to do is to have control over those laptops from my central PC to enable me to "switch off" the internet to any of the laptops from my PC, is there a simple way of doing this?, any help appreciated

rgds

alex

[SoftStag]

Hi texacoal, welcome to the forums!

What you are asking isn't a feature of most routers. Probably the best way to achieve this is to restrict who can connect to the router by MAC address (this is like a fingerprint of the wireless device). You can then enable and disable the permitted MAC addresses as you see fit. This would prevent the PCs connecting to the router at all, so they would not be able to see other computers on the network or anything.

To do this, you would need to log in to the router's administration console, ensure there is a password set that only you know, and configure the router appropriately. Instructions on how to achieve this should be in the manual for your router.
_________________
"Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features."
-- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine

[texacoal]

[SoftStag]

You're welcome.

I'm afraid this is not the most straightforward thing to do, and a little bit cumbersome in order to turn people on and off.

Thinking about it, if you don't need to turn off individual systems, you could just go in to the router config and turn off/on the wireless capabilities. Then it's wired and wireless, or just wired. One other thing that came to mind is to use a second router. This gives you the ease of flicking a switch to turn off the router supplying the wi-fi signal, while the wired PC is connected to the main router. Not sure what your setup is, but you have a main router connecting to the internet with the PC on one ethernet connection and the other router on another ethernet connection. The second router must be a standard router (with wi-fi) as in not with a built in ADSL modem. To do this both routers will need to be configured with a different IP range, but that's fairly straight forward.
_________________
"Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features."
-- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine