Wi-fi Scheduling and New Devices issue

[eastmannathand]

Been a Google Nest user for approximately three years. Love the function of setting up devices in groups and creating schedules for those devices. I have four teenage kids at home, so this really helps with keeping them off their devices on school nights. For example, our current Wi-Fi schedule turns off devices at 10 PM and restarts at 6 AM.  Wi-Fi is off so they go to bed. However, I have a very crafty son, who figured out if he simply forgets the Wi-Fi Network on his PC or device and re-signs in… it issues him a new IP address and Google Nest Wi-Fi recognizes him as a new device.😱 And if you are famailar with the system when a new device is added I have to go in and manually assign that new device to a specific Wi-Fi group I created. And if I dont he has complete access (no schedule) to the Wi-Fi network. Because you can’t designate new devices to automatically assign to a group.  I called tech support and nobody has a solution to block this loophole.😕 So Im making this post to hopefully have Google create away to block this from happening. I must say he’s a smart kid. Mischievous but very smart. Almost makes me proud he figured out a way to beat Google. 😂

[David_K · Accepted solution]

This system uses the MAC address of the device, it's not using the IP address. However, I suspect your son's device either has something called MAC randomisation turned on (literally what it sounds like, it randomises the unique identifier, the MAC address, of the device, each time it connects to the network), or he knows how to manually change his MAC address on the device, which isn't all that difficult, hence you're experiencing this.

I’d encourage you to also send this feedback directly to Google. You will not receive a response, unless Google need more details from you, however the team are still reading the feedback.

[eastmannathand]

Nope. He is simply forgetting the network and re-signing in. Pretty easy loop hole. Pretty easy to replicate. Wether its a mac or Ip doesn't matter so much as it automatically reassigned a new address when he signs back in. Not great either way. 😕

[Dave472]

I have the same issue but my kid doesn't know the main wifi password so I  forgot main Wifi and setup the guest account and logged his devices to that so I can turn off manually this is a pain to do every day.. What it needs is a time of use for the guest network function or a block new device connections on the main wifi even if they know the password my old router had this feature. The other way I thought might work is limit the LAN device IP range but have not explored this option yet.

Cheers

Dave

[David_K]

Forgetting the network triggers MAC randomisation as I explained above, my answer is just a more technical explanation of what's happening behind the scenes.