Comments on: Leopard’s Parental Controls a possible source of resource hogging?

By: davidos

davidos — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:55:07 +0000

yeah, ActyMac DutyWatch good software

By: bolh

bolh — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:40:39 +0000

for parental control i use ActyMac DutyWatch

By: Cindy

Cindy — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:59:22 +0000

4 kids have accounts on my laptop. The only parental control I use on those accounts is the time limits. Until upgrading to snow leopard, I had no problems, but now I have endless problems. If I add time to any of the accounts, it disables the time limits for all. In order to fix it I have to repair permissions and restart. Like others here, I need to have those limits in order to keep peace in the house. Snow Leopard has also slowed everything down on the laptop – and I don’t use any parental control but the time limits. This REALLY sucks.

By: Deke

Deke — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:30:19 +0000

Another problem to add……Seems the ability to add websites is not blocked at all. When we try to use the normal way (add admin user name and password), it does not work. However, if you cancel, it just let’s you add the website!

By: fara

fara — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:22:49 +0000

We bought 2 mac computers because we heard they were the best. I was pleased until I decided to use the parent controls. My first problem is the time I set for the computers to sign off. Sometimes it works and sometimes it dosen’t. I will set it and it will work and the next day or so it is back to original settings. My other problem is on the other computer the logs do not work.
I have been working on these problems for a solid month and I have changed my password twice thinking maybe the kids were changing the settings! I am frustrated beyond belief!

By: Laurie

Laurie — Sat, 16 May 2009 04:03:54 +0000

I have Leopard 10.5.6 and the parental controls usually worked until recently when the timer options have completely given up. I checked the settings and they are where I set them, but it is now 2 hours past when the boys should have been kicked off and there is no indication on the sign-in window that they can’t sign on.
This is really frustrating because they are home alone more as they get older and I would love the machine to kick them off when I am not around to do it. The iPod is just too tempting to realistically expect them to get off in a reasonable amount of time when I’m not around. Okay, I guess that means I should keep them off completely when I’m not here. But it won’t let me do that, either…..

By: jon

jon — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:18:09 +0000

a few cool parental control utilities for Windwos are listed here http://www.parentalfiltercontrol.com/

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:30:34 +0000

Yep, same with me regarding no Internet access with parental controls enabled. Had my iMac since February and up until about a month ago (July ’08) it was working fine and now my kid’s accounts can’t access the Internet. Apple phone support was no help and neither were the Apple Genius’, as they call themselves, at two Apple stores. May end up getting a third party application to handle filtering. Lovely, another expense. Granted, there may be better applications to handle access and filtering, but so far I wasn’t that disappointed, except for some of the blocked sites that really shouldn’t be blocked. I also check the log files for their accounts to check for any sites that I think are bad. A lot of times as long as the kids know you’re actively looking at their activity that will act as a deterrent, until they go online at their friend’s house! ;-)

I do try and limit their usage, but I take an integrated approach which I suggest more people do. I set the ‘technology’ controls on the PC for usage times but I also have the ‘human’ control which is me making sure they don’t sit online for hours. More work, but they are my kids. “As long as they live under my roof and until they’re 18…” parents know the rest of this statement!!

Hopefully we’ll get improvements soon to these annoying problems.

By: Mac Parent

Mac Parent — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:13:47 +0000

The timer can completely be ignored. I bout 2 new iMacs for my kids to keep them safe, based on the parental controls. Also I wanted to limit their time use to only one hour a day and 2 hours on weekend days. But my kids simply ignore the timer and are able to stay logged in! I have 5 children that use the computer, so it is important that I be able to revolve them. One tool for that was the time allotment. But it doesn’t work. Logging in to the parental controls (even though I’ve enabled it) from my macbook pro doesn’t work either. What gives Apple? I own 6 Macs total. I’ve converted my entire family. All I ask is that if the options are there, make them work!

By: Brian Jordan

Brian Jordan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:57:43 +0000

Has this been fixed yet?

By: Gavin

Gavin — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:13:02 +0000

Same deal happened to me now. My kids accounts were all completely locked out of internet access and only my administrator account worked. It had been working fine but then just stopped, no change in the parental control options. Reboot made no difference. Network utilities would work, pings from terminal no problem, dns resolved fine to public web sites from network utilities and terminal. But Safari, Firefox and even Mail were all locked out from the internet.
When I disabled parental controls on the kids accounts everything worked again. But of course now I have no parental controls. This is on a new Imac that shipped with Leopard. Looks like a bug that needs fixing. Nice to know it isn’t only happening to me.

By: Kirt

Kirt — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:21:53 +0000

*&*$*#&#
Parental controls was working fine for me UNTIL I upgraded to 10.5.1. Now, anytime parental controls is active, regardless of the settings (even with no restrictions set in the kid’s account), the kids cannot get to the internet at all. Zero. All websites are blocked. I ran network utilities from their accounts and get good pings from google, etc. But Safari won’t connect to anything. As soon as I disable parental controls – no problem. Guess the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to Apple too….entropy wins.

By: Sanjay

Sanjay — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:49:08 +0000

I finally bit the bullet and did a complete clean install of my system and was able to track down what in parental controls was causing 100% CPU usage.

The bottom line, on my system, is that when I enable restrictions on which programs a managed account can use, then and only then do I see the runaway CPU usage.

A work around to this is to use parental controls for the web site controls and for the time controls but not for the program controls. To implement program controls, I have manually edited the preferences for the programs I wish to control:

1. Set everyone to no-access
2. Add users to have read access that should be able to run various programs.

This is not ideal but I only wanted to restrict a handful of programs so it was not that time consumming for me. The only downside is that if a managed account downloads a program from the internet then they can run it until I take explicit action. For me this is ok since my main interest in parental controls was time and website restrictions.

Hope this helps!

By: billy

billy — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:07:06 +0000

I enabled parental controls for monitoring logging only…I left full web access…however, I simple sites like facebook or some car sites the parental controls limited access when i didn’t set any limits. Any thoughts on this?

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:20:41 +0000

For Dashboard issues, you can’t just remove the plist and cache files. I had to start up with my Leopard CD, go to Disk Utility, and repair permissions. Funny thing is, I know Dashboard has worked with Leopard. The Parental Control CPU hog issue is also new. Not sure what changed, but something set this off.

By: Chad

Chad — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:03:27 +0000

Why is it so hard any other blogs with this issue? I can’t find anything about this on apple’s site and it seems like it should be a noted issue. I too, have kids on the computer for 3-4 hours when their time limit is 1 hour. I also experience dashboard issues. I used to use MacMinder but was always a little leary about performance and other side-effects, so was excited when there was an integrated solution. Leopard Parental Controls not only had less features, the ones they do have don’t work. What a disappointment. And yes, shame on Apple for letting it go production in this state of disarray.