adzza/guardium-dns

Guardium DNS is a self hosted dashboard that adds parental control features on top of Technitium DNS, an existing open source DNS server that many home lab users already run. Instead of building a DNS filter from scratch, this project sits on top of one and gives it a friendly interface plus scheduling and device management features aimed at families rather than network engineers. The project is built by one parent who works in networking, as a free alternative to paid cloud based parental control subscriptions that see every website a household visits. Everything runs on the user's own hardware and network. It lets a parent create per device profiles such as unrestricted, kids, no streaming, no gaming, no YouTube, or fully blocked, and group multiple devices under one household member so the same rule applies to all of that person's devices at once. On top of profiles, it supports recurring schedules like bedtime or school hours, daily time quotas for things like video streaming, and a single button to pause internet access for everyone except adult devices. For more technical users, it also tracks devices by their network hardware address so a profile follows a device even if its local network address changes, and it tries to guess what kind of device something is, such as a smart TV or phone, from its network traffic patterns. Every minute, the dashboard checks its own state against Technitium and, if configured, the home router, and corrects any drift automatically. Guardium only talks to Technitium through its official web API and never edits its files directly, so upgrading or removing Guardium does not put the underlying DNS server at risk. An optional, more advanced layer can push additional enforcement into an ASUS home router, such as cutting a device off the network entirely or blocking encrypted DNS traffic that tries to bypass the filter, though this has only been tested on one specific ASUS router model so far. The project is explicitly early stage and warns that its behavior may change without notice, so it fits home lab enthusiasts and technically comfortable parents more than someone wanting a polished, finished product. The full README is longer than what was shown.