background program on OS X
 

Anyone know about any program I can run in the background on my daughter's computer to restrict TCP/IP usage to set hours?
thanks

Lol, I do NOT look forward to this stage with my son:)

Re: background program on OS X
 

OSX Tiger has great stuff built in. If you want to go with keystroke recording parental spyware, use Spector.

Actually I just want to install a root program to turn TCP/IP on and off at a specific time, and the time should be not dependent upon internal time stamp as that is easily thwarted.

I dunno what exists for that purpose, but if you're good at scripting, you could schedule a task that would edit /etc/hosts to redirect everything to your 127.0.0.1, then it could replace it with the "good" hosts file during a specified time. I'm sure there's an easier way, though.

This looks promising;

http://www.akrontech.com/third.html

Don't do it on the computer - do it on your access router.

Promising for windows folks only, though:
System Requirements
Windows (XP, 2000, Me, 9x)
Any processor
Any size memory
Only 6 Mb of Hard Disk space

I looked at that, thanks. But it wants to limit all functions on the pc.
I wonder if anyone knows how to program airport exteme to curtail a specific computer IP address from getting any outside of LAN contact.

One thing you could do would be to enable logging on the Airport Extreme. (Do this by clicking the Airport Options Button in the Airport tab of the utility.) If you've reserved a given IP for your daughter's computer, you can demonstrate to her that you can look up when she was using the network (instant messaging, browsing, itunes, etc) and what IPs she was connecting to. How you leverage this info is left as an exercise for the parent. :)

You might also want to ask on the macnn forums. Lots of good answers can be found there.

great info. thanks

I have looked through all my router (2wire) and access point (Cisco - Aironet) settings for a way to do this. Right now, when I go to bed at night, I just unplug the wireless access point and the daughter is shut down for the night. However, I too would like to find a way (free preferred) to limit her to specific hours.

That was my parents' approach back in the day. The first time they unplugged me, I just whipped out another phone line and connected from another room. The next day after school, the modem had been uninstalled from my machine. Luckilly, I always carry a spare and was back up and running in no time. Eventually, they settled for logging my internet use, and when they found out that most of it was spent learning programming and things, they gave up.

of course... if I had a kid I'd probably be pretty strict these days too. pr0n and misc. predators weren't as prevalent 7 years ago as they are now.

Another thought -- and this is something of a workaround -- use cron to turn off the interface at a specified time. "ifconfig eth0 down" has worked (in one form or another) on most unix boxes that I've had the pleasure of flirting with. Ought to require root/admin access to do, so she shouldn't be able to muck around with it. Not sure how OSX works, though.

To reduce the ease with which she can meddle with the internal clock, there ought to be a way to set up a time server. The basic idea is that the system updates it's clock from an external source on a routine basis -- every 10 minutes, or whatever. That would fix her little red wagon, but good. Yeah.

I'll keep mulling on that idea, and ping on my Mac friends this evening.

Dan

Yup, set a cron job to turn off the network card (or just reconfigure it to a bad address) and re-enable it at the proper time.

Enable some sort of authentication and set up an authentication server (freeradius comes to mind) which you can set login times that are whatever you set them to be.

Only thing is you need some server running the authentication software for that to work.

Yeah, The internet is bad as all get out these days. I'm not eevn sure *I* should be on it. When my son is old enough he'll be allowed supervision is a must. Hopefully he won't be better than me with them too quickly.

which cisco access point to you have? I think you can do a proxy authentication with a local user database (on the access point) and set the hours in the access point.

I have to look it up to be sure...

You can probably keep system time synced automatically to the Apple server.

Thanks mikester - I'll check the model when I get home as well as look for the proxy authentication options.

Other than the router and access point, I pretty much shut everything off when I'm not home, so getting something set up on the router or access point to limit her hours would be the best way to go.

Well, I looked it up an in Cisco IOS you can do proxy authentication of course - I still need to know the device info.

The problem remains that you need an external radius or tacacs+ server to do the actual user authentication. I checked it out an the IOS doesn't support proxy authentication with a local user database. Lame...

Oh well.

There's got to be some parental controls on the Mac as Moses said (he's always right anyway).