[ale] Making kids stop being entitled slackers with free software

[JD]

Many routers have access time controls - tomato and dd-wrt definitely do.
Seems much easier, though squid setup as a transparent proxy AND blocking DNS to
all clients would be fun too.

On 03/04/2014 10:26 PM, Dustin Strickland wrote:
> So, my (much)younger brother is doing middle school online. As kids his
> age do, he has issues with motivating himself to do anything other than
> play video games, think about playing video games, watch Youtube
> commentators play video games, or munching on unhealthy food that he
> will never be able to work off if he continues his daily routine(while
> talking about video games).
> 
> I think I have a solution, but I would like ALE's opinion on the best
> way to implement it. Here is a simple map of my home network(using
> generic names, of course):
> http://s29.postimg.org/fgrszgq4n/network_map.png
> 
> My goal is simple: Unless he does a set amount of work each weekday
> when scheduled, the network will lock down to prevent him from doing
> anything else. Also, the network will lock down at 9 PM(10:30 on
> weekends) and unlock at 6 AM. There will be an override
> method for everyone else. His X session will also be suspended at these
> times on his main machine(he uses Steam), and ideally all game consoles
> would refuse to boot as well. If Microsoft were nice, they would allow
> you to remotely change the parental controls PIN and settings for the
> Xbox 360 remotely so that I could automate this job, but they have an
> extensive history of making gimmicky products that are barely usable if
> you need flexibility, so it is to be expected that they don't.
> 
> After getting my feet wet in the field with a quick Google search, I'm
> thinking that I want to use Squid. I'm probably going to
> install Xen on his main machine, workstation-0, and have a PV domU take
> care of everything. Do you guys approaching this the right way(from a
> technical standpoint I mean, I really don't care what you think about
> the ethics of it), and is there any other software you would recommend
> for this purpose?
> ___________________