A friend of mine is looking for a way to limit time his kids spent on the internet. I told him he should try out Squid proxy server. He now tries to find a way to limit total time spend on the internet to "X" hours a day, at any time during the day.
I remember there are built-in rules in Squid to "open" internet access in certain times of the day (you can say www.site.com is only reachable after 17:00 for example), but there seems no built-in rule to open internet access for total of say 2 hours a day anytime between 8am and 8pm.
I was wondering if someone could throw name of an external plugin/add-on to Squid that would provide such functionality ... ?
You can't measure how long a chair is occupied from network connections. If you send one text message at 11:00, then send another at 11:15, does that mean you were sitting watching the phone for 15 minutes? Same problem. It gets even more difficult with how computers are so willing to access the internet of their own volition, for updates and the like. The computer could wake up at 2am and eat all his daily internet "time".
If you wish to measure occupancy of the chair, something local on the machine would work better.
This isn't the answer, but might be related. It forces Windows to logout when the screensaver goes on.
If a local solution won't do, then you'll need one of those obnoxious motel wireless systems that lock you out until you explicitly login, then kick you out again after a time limit.
This is true, I was thinking however of some sort of approximation, so that if Squid sees HTTP GET requests one after another within defined time window it sums up the time and calculates it as single uninterrupted session. When pause would exceed defined time window Squid would assume person had left the chair and would stop counting time.
I don't think this will work for other reasons I mentioned. Any kind of automatic update, which modern computers haul with them in droves, will mess this detection up.