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Metered HTTP Proxy?

Jon asks: "My brother-in-law has three teenage daughters. The only thing that he has to hold over their head is being online. I am trying to find him an HTTP proxy server that has metering built in. I started with Squid which has the authentication stuff in it but we would like something where we could allocate minutes, like some of the WiFi stuff you encounter at a hot spot."

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  1. Suggestion by Geoffreyerffoeg · · Score: 3, Informative

    Enough other posters have said that the principle behind this is a bad idea, so instead of reiterating that, I'm going to comment on the technical method of metering HTTP usage.

    First, if it's just time restrictions, you can probably use your router's features. My router's setup page lets me block access from an IP range to a port range between a time range; I've used this to block a spam daemon on my mom's computer from getting to port 25 [yes, this blocked normal e-mail], or to block myself from wasting time past 7PM.

    Barring that, I'd suggest writing your own server, or getting someone to do so for you. An HTTP server and a client are not hard to write; I wrote them in about a week of classtime each (got bored in my programming class). Or you can simply put a Perl script together that uses standard modules. Once you have a client and a server, it's a simple matter to tie them together, totaling the number of bytes transferred into a variable/disk file.

    On a completely unrelated and stupid-sounding idea: does Apache stop serving when it can't write to log files? If so, just make it log proxy requests to a floppy disk.