Question on Access Plans on Firewall (Kind of like an ISP)

[Bob Edwards]

Peter Foley wrote:
> 
> Heya all,
> 
> My Parents are deciding to get Transact as well, and my mother has asked me
> to put together something that will be able to restrict my brother to only
> using the Net during certain times of the day and also give him a MB Limit.
> 
> I am going to build them a firewall box but am completely mystified on how
> to do the restrictions.  I know there must be a way to do it (quite a few
> ISPs run off Linux).  Any pointers to software or Howtos?
> 
> I am still siffting through all the docs that I found on IPTables, would the
> answers be in there?  So far I have not come across anything to suggest that
> IPTables can do this.
> 
> If it helps there is a machine that is running LDAP and Samba.  So I have
> user accounts setup already.
> 
> Also I would like to have the Firewall handle all the restrictions
> (Naturally it can look to the other machine for info in the LDAP database)
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Peter

I haven't done it, but something like a squid server on your gateway machine
with authentication requirements. I think it can be set up to change based on
the time of day (maybe using a cron job or similar). Of course, you will want
to set up junkbuster or similar on this machine as well.

Squid also may save you some of your MB usage in any case, so your brother
can do more surfing for the same MB limit (then again, maybe not).

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.