I'd like to track how much time my kid is using the internet from any of his multitude of devices by setting up a dedicated router for him and tracking how much time the internet is enabled. My idea was to allow my kid to enable the internet himself by sending a ping to the router. Eg:

ping -i 60 -c 45 192.168.1.1

would enable the internet for 45 minutes (each ping would enable it for say 65 seconds). I figured an iptables rule to send ping requests to user space and a user space app to enable/disable internet access and keep a persistent counter of the number of minutes that the internet was enabled would work. Could this be easily done with OpenWrt or is there maybe already the equivalent functionality?  I've never used OpenWrt before.

Thanks,

      Dave

You might want to have a look at "captive portals", it's probably what you are looking for.

Hi you want Gargoyle.
https://www.gargoyle-router.com/index.php
You can do things like this.
Parents would really like the kids to focus on homework for a couple of hours, and get some sleep after “lights out”.
https://www.gargoyle-router.com/wiki/do … o-homework

or this:
https://www.gargoyle-router.com/wiki/do … -teenagers

lol

FWIW I've been letting windows 10 manage screen time for me.  If you're using windows/xbox (no tablets or phones!) this may be good enough if you can't get what you're looking for?