Parental Controls on MAC

[TechGuy911]

Hi everyone,

I'll just say, right up front, I know nothing about MAC OS.

One of my clients has a teenage daughter who seems to have gotten into some trouble using her laptop. She called me today asking if I can help them lock down her Macbook to keep her from using social networking sites and IM without parental approval. I found some documentation on how to set up parental controls on MAC, and I had also thought of OpenDNS and setting up filtering through that, but it seems both solutions are 'All On or All Off' and doesn't give an opportunity to allow these activities from time to time with parental password authorization.

I had also thought of creating multiple user accounts on the MAC, one with more access than the other that the parent can log them into when allowed.

My question on this would be, can you change the current account, which I am guessing is admin, to a limited account, then create a new seperate Administrator Account and second limited account?

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks
Randy

[kagman]

Hey whats up.. Opendns is great.. i use it for work.. but thats only good in a network setting..

one way you can really block websites is just to change the hosts file on the computer. So no matter where that computer goes, it will not able to access certain sites that you specify...

[trapped]

K9 web protection works on the Mac. I have used it for a couple of clients now and aside from the fact that you have to request a license and have it e-mailed it seems to work well.

[anonymous Mac Tech]

My question on this would be, can you change the current account, which I am guessing is admin, to a limited account, then create a new seperate Administrator Account and second limited account?


If you want to change the current admin account to standard, just create another admin account because there has to be one admin account of course. Then if you enable parental controls on the standard account it becomes a managed account. Parental controls have actually come a log way with OSX. You can block certain domains, apps, and even schedule time limits. Not sure which version of OSX you are running but here's (http://theappleblog.com/2009/01/13/kid-proofing-a-mac-with-parental-controls/) a look into some of the things that can adjusted.

[hyfidel]

Keep checking the OpenDNS plans page - the Deluxe version @ 9.99/year is supposed to get a blocked page bypass add-on soon.

[Scotty]

What about parental control,you can use ProteMac KeyBag ,it' s key logger as well.I use it.It's programm recorder all what happens on computer.