Hello router experts,

My 10 years old LevelOne router is about to pass away and I am looking for a replacement. The router has a capability to allow Internet flow from specific devices only at specific times within a week, i.e. 16:00-20:00 during workdays and 12:00-20:00 during weekends. Now I am looking for the replacement and so far I could not identify a single router that can perform this simple task. I am still searching and I need confirmation that router can do that before I buy it. I was reading RouterOS documentation extensively, yet it is not clear enough and I cannot test the router without buying it, so I hope you can give me this answer.

The procedure with LevelOne router was the following:
1. setting static IPs to all domestic devices (leaving dynamic IPs to guest devices) - this is perhaps ip arp command, but what is the meaning of interface?
2. creating two groups of IP addresses - this is perhaps address-list line of command, I couldn't find a single example of creating list that includes more than one static entry!
3. define schedule 16:00-20:00 during workdays and 12:00-20:00 during weekends, no example of this kind of schedule in documentation.
4. attaching groups of IP addresses to schedules.

Is something similar possible to do in RouterOS? I suppose GUI does not have this capabilities, but command line commands would be still good.

Thanks for the answer.

... I cannot test the router without buying it, ...

Wrong. You can download fully working virtual router with all features except wireless and test any configuration you want. And as long as you're fine with 1Mbit/s limit, which should be enough for testing, it's free. Look for Cloud Hosted Router on download page.

I think what you want should be possible, I've seen some time settings in firewall config, but I've never used it myself.

You can download fully working virtual router with all features except wireless and test any configuration you want. And as long as you're fine with 1Mbit/s limit, which should be enough for testing, it's free. Look for Cloud Hosted Router on download page.

I feel stupid, but I don't know how to install it. Not even after reading manual on address http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CHR

Not even these nice tutorials help? Do you have previous experience with virtualization, i.e. running one operating system inside another operating system? I hope so, it would make it much easier. But it's really very simple, you get some virtualization software (VMware Player or VirtualBox run on regular Windows PC and are free to use), create a new virtual machine and when it asks for disk, you select the file downloaded from MikroTik. Then you start it and you can play with your new system without fear of breaking anything on your computer. You can add another virtual machine(s), create virtual network links and test any imaginable configuration. I'm not sure what exactly are you stuck on, so I don't know what advice would help you.

You can do the time scheduling of Internet access with ros as you need.