PompeyGlen wrote

My kids are configuring their devices to get dynamic Mac Addresses, therefore all the parental controls on the Deco app are completely obsolete.

 

Is there anyway to deal with this in the app yet e.g. Don't allow new devices?

 

I see users have been asking for a solution to this in these forums for about 5 years.

  @PompeyGlen don't you mean the devices are using private MAC addresses?

The change that has been done by phone and tablet manufactures (and I think Windows may also be doing it now) have been around for a while.

Mostly this is not something that the device user does, it's automatically done by the device and disabling it can be a pain since it often get changed back by the device.

I don't have any good ideas of how it could be resolved. 

ImtiazAli wrote

@raven-au No, it's a manual option now (it has been for years) in the phone's Wi-Fi settings.

 

You can keep it to "use device MAC" or change it to "use private/randomized MAC"

  @ImtiazAli I know, what I was complaining about is that it often gets set back to use a private MAC address.

I see that it mostly dosn't happen on my Android phone any more but the iDevices (eg. iPhone, iPad) seem to set it back fairly often, don't know what events cause it.

I'm left with trying to track them down quite frequently which is quite difficult.

Thanks for replies.

This is a fundamental flaw in the system.

I tried to work around it by trying to set reservations for every device, to then enable me to set a very tight DHCP pool and effectively that would exclude anything unknown.  However the app is beyond frustrating, and would constantly report 'Failed' on every attempt to set a reservation.

I have taken out the 5 Deco devices I had covering my property and replaced with a Unifi Cloud Gateway and 1 Ubiquiti AP which covers my whole home and gives professional grade network management way beyond what the Deco stuff could do.

  @ImtiazAli It's an easy selection in Android settings to use Randomised MAC on a wifi connection, as it is in Windows.

It's very common now, and without the TP Link developers dealing with it the parental controls are worthless.

I've moved away to some more professional network tools so I can actually have control over what my users are doing.

@raven-au Looks like it's an iOS specific issue then. I've never had it happen on my Android phone

  @ImtiazAli yes, it happens much less on Android and I have found that on iOS (or iPadOS) that selecting fixed rather than random and recording that private mac address allows me to identify devices on my network.

ImtiazAli wrote

@PompeyGlen Read before commenting lol...the point wasn't whether the selection is "easy" or not, but the fact that I've never had it go back to "randomized" automatically if I set it to "Device MAC Address".

 

And yes, unless Deco rolls out whitelist feature to more devices, it's gonna be an issue

  @ImtiazAli but that's not that easy unless it's part of, for example, parental controls (perhaps).

For some unknown reason domestic routers still store the values that are needed for customization in an NVRAM area that's quite small.

That gives rise to several problems like limitations on the number of devices that can have reserved address, on the number of devices on black or white lists and pretty much any feature in the core functionality of the device that needs to persistently store a list.

It seems likely the security and parental controls store persistent data in a cloud account (probably our tp-link account) so that could be possible and it is the parental controls that are most affected so it also makes sense.

It's like the lame Mesh network implementation for Archer routers not propagating any non-core wireless networks to satellite nodes (Guest, Iot, MLO, etc.) that has been requested for around a year now.

It's mystifying why TP Link doesn't take advantage of the opportunity to add value to their product that other companies also omit or get wrong, like the MAC address issue and the above Mesh issue.