Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

mich04 · 2015-07-23 00:09:38

Hello,
I am going from having no kids to 2 14 year old boys I am a foster dad. I have an office computer with Arch. I need to be able to track websites that they each user visits, even when they are in incognito mode. I just want it to be simple logging.

I have DD-WRT v24-sp2 (03/25/13) mini it shows logging in the firewall but when I activate it it does not record anything.

ewaller · 2015-07-23 00:19:19

I think the DD-WRT firmware forwards logs to another machine. Check their forums on the specifics.

Why do you need to track them? Is it a foster requirement? With my kids, I found an open and honest discussion about appropriate actions coupled with the threat of what would happen should I be disappointed prevented me from ever having a problem. It also made them comfortable to talk with me when one of them tried to do research for a school paper on human reproduction. You can imagine what happened, and they were comfortable bringing it to my attention. Admittedly, they are my natural children and had the pleasure of guiding them from birth. You do not have that luxury.

What will you do when they ssh into a proxy server?

CrazyLinuxNerd · 2015-07-23 00:35:32

ewaller wrote:

I think the DD-WRT firmware forwards logs to another machine. Check their forums on the specifics.
Why do you need to track them? Is it a foster requirement? With my kids, I found an open and honest discussion about appropriate actions coupled with the threat of what would happen should I be disappointed prevented me from ever having a problem. It also made them comfortable to talk with me when one of them tried to do research for a school paper on human reproduction. You can imagine what happened, and they were comfortable bringing it to my attention. Admittedly, they are my natural children and had the pleasure of guiding them from birth. You do not have that luxury.
What will you do when they ssh into a proxy server?

Luckily, in Linux you can put quite a few strong limits on standard user accounts. For example one of the (many) basic ways to stop SSH you can change the group permissions on the SSH binary so that only users of "cool" group can use the binary, while users in "sucks" group will get permission denied errors.

Although, you'll have to keep a list of files you've modified in case an update replaces one and resets the permissions.

Or, you could do the simple way.. keep the computer in a family room, such as the living room and be present whenever they are on the computer. This would probably be the most effective way of keeping an eye on them and is the way I would choose to do it if I accidentally ended up having children.

Although you have no control on what goes on outside of your own home (Friends homes, mobiles etc.)

Trilby · 2015-07-23 00:45:12

While it's generallly presented in other contexts, it applies just as much here: there is no such thing as security when someone has physical access to the machine. Reboot w/ break=postmount, change the groups or permissions as desired, reboot again, and you can do whatever you want.

Anything done at a software level either on the arch machine or the router will only be a hurdle, not an actual barrier. Such hurdles if not overcome will simply teach young people to give up (one of the most toxic experiences in our society in my view). But if such hurdles are overcome your kids will gain resiliency and learn many valuable lessons about computers, technology, networking, etc. Of course they will also learn to see you as an opponent.

I've somewhat overstated the above for effect, but only somewhat. Take ewaller's approach. Pick your battles. You will not prevent chidlren from seeing things you don't want them to see. But you can guide them in reacting in healthy acceptable ways.

(Edit: OOPS, yes, my post is just about blocking - sorry pay no attention to the crazy man behind the keyboard.)

ngoonee · 2015-07-23 01:09:43

I believe the OP was asking about logging, not blocking. As a (very young) parent myself, I don't generally support blocks, simply because if my son is at all related to me the blocks won't prove more than a temporary hindrance as Trilby says.

However, logging which lets me know what's going on serves the purpose of informing my interaction with my son. That is to say, I will know that its time to have a serious talk about responsible behaviour online.

Particularly important with foster children, I would guess.

ewaller · 2015-07-23 02:32:25

I am now home, on the LAN side of my DD-WRT router. Okay, enabling logs in the GUI causes the router to write messages that exceed the log level to the logs in /var/log. With logging set to high, my logs last about 9 hours before they rotate. There is not a lot of storage, and I get about a couple dozen log entries per minute at high. Medium might last a day or so. You can write a cron script to push it to you Arch box, or you can write a script on the arch box to pull the logs. That might be the better approach.

To see the logs, you are going to want to ssh in to the router (I assume you have turned off Telnet)

Edit: In fact, the most of what you will want to do will probably best be done through ssh rather than the GUI

Last edited by ewaller (2015-07-23 02:34:14)

mich04 · 2015-07-23 02:34:44

Yes I am not talking about blocking because I think that blocking sends the wrong message, Lol there are hundreds of ways for kids to get porn, a lot of search engines embedded it in their image search so blocking it is pretty much impossible. The kids I have right now have had problems with porn addiction in the past and we were told by the agency that we have to be careful with their internet activities. Right now they are doing ok, but I will only know if it is a problem if I can catch it. ngoonee is right on about what I am actually looking for. In order to talk about responsible behavior you have to first be able to know it exist.

It is also not a requirement for being a foster parent.

Trilby · 2015-07-23 02:46:21

Sorry - I misread. Logging should be a very practical approach.

ewaller · 2015-07-23 04:13:44

Well, my hat is off to you. I think it is great that you are able to bring those kids into your home; and tracking them does indeed make sense.

Can you ssh into your router? Check /var/log/messages and see that it is collecting data. Then, I would automate forwarding those logs. This page for OpenWRT might be useful. DD-WRT uses BusyBox's syslogd.

mich04 · 2015-07-24 01:47:58

I will check into the routers logging capability. I did instll httpry on the computer they are going to use. It allows me to log each user, but it provides too much data. I went to www.cheese.com and the log was already very full and hard to read.

mich04 · 2015-07-30 22:49:20

So the router does not work so well because it is only tracking the ip address and is very difficult to try and find the correct ip of the actual site. httpry gives me too much information to and is hard to filter any ideas? Someone has to be doing this somewhere XD

Alad · 2015-07-31 00:37:45

How about http://askubuntu.com/questions/116319/h … gnito-mode

mich04 · 2015-07-31 06:50:11

GNU nano 2.4.2 File: post

I did see that post before, I did not see the links at the bottom. Ok so
I have disabled incognito pretty easily and I think I found the setting
for chromium that I want, but when I try to implement it it does not
function. Here is what I have

/etc/c/etc/chromium/policies/managed/disable_incognito.json

{
    "IncognitoModeAvailability": 1
}

I made another file called disable_history.json here is the contents

{
  "SavingBrowserHistoryDisabled": false
}

I also made one file

 {
 
  "IncognitoModeAvailability": 1,
  "SavingBrowserHistoryDisabled": false
}

Here is the link to chromium policies does anyone see a way to disable a user to delete history?

http://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3

Awebb · 2015-07-31 08:05:38

A different approach, if I may. A friend of mine has a porn addiction problem. He's in his late 20's. He wasn't diagnosed, nobody pointed fingers at him, he simply approached me one day and told me. He didn't exactly ask for help, he just wanted to talk. However, the good friend I am, I waited for him to leave the room and rewrote his hosts file. I took a normal porn filter list (find them online) and pointed all of the entries to http://yourbrainonporn.com/. While, as a Discordian, I am not allowed to believe anything I read and "studies" about neurochemistry and behavior are always fishy at best, the things on this site at least read plausible enough to stimulate the mind and think about the causes and not the symptoms.

However, if having majored in pedagogy in a secular society is worth anything, then I can assure you, that a 14 years old with porn addiction is not very plausible. Every single one of my male friends spent their time between 13 and 15 basically defaulting to masturbation, when nothing else was available to do. The ammount of consumed porn was gigantic, considering the fact that 64 kbit/s ISDN was light speed back then. We even made arrangements to obtain and copy porn tapes and magazines, so everybody had enough material all the time. We were also quite open about this (thanks to a society allowing us to be). I cannot even try to count how many times we started a sentence with "When you're done wanking, ...". When we transitioned into early adulthood, most of us finally found females to experience the real thing, besides that one fellow who is now absolutely convinced, that he has porn addiction.

I'd be less worried about them spoiling their minds with porn than I would be about them bringing you behind bars with copyright infringements.

mich04 · 2015-07-31 14:37:51

I am not really looking for a debate, Also the children I get have very different levels of maturity and the information provided on that site is far too much for some of them to understand at this point in their lives because of developmental delays and previous upbringing. I do appreciate your thoughts. Recently about 3 weeks ago one of the children had his phone and I asked to borrow it to look something up and found massive amounts of porn on it. We do not have smart phones this is one he had brought with him. Porn addiction with 14 year olds is.

I think it is hard for me to take your statement "However, if having majored in pedagogy in a secular society is worth anything, then I can assure you, that a 14 years old with porn addiction is not very plausible.". With the amount of trauma, past upbringing and drug use these children have been exposed to it is hard to imagine porn not becoming something that they find comfort in.

Isn't that what happens when you take drugs. Yes with drugs you are entering new chemistry into your body, but with porn you are rewriting neural pathways. Maybe in general society we call this "preferences in the bedroom" this though can sometimes be the only preference we can accept. I also think it is unfair to compare them to your childhood. I do not know how you grew up, but you take one of the kids I meet and he was dropped out of a 4 story window when he was very young, but I know that this is highly debated even among many professionals.

mich04 · 2015-07-31 15:05:45

I found the solution to my problem

http://superuser.com/questions/110675/p … gle-chrome

looks like per user I can add these settings to ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences

"history": {
       "deleting_enabled": false
   },

Now users can not delete their history easily.

clfarron4 · 2015-07-31 20:20:59

Why does the famous NSA system hardening guide for Redhat 5 come to mind here? Combining it with the updated Redhat 6 guide should get you somewhere, depending on what you're planning.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-07-23 00:09:38

Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#2 2015-07-23 00:19:19

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#3 2015-07-23 00:35:32

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#4 2015-07-23 00:45:12

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#5 2015-07-23 01:09:43

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#6 2015-07-23 02:32:25

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#7 2015-07-23 02:34:44

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#8 2015-07-23 02:46:21

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#9 2015-07-23 04:13:44

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#10 2015-07-24 01:47:58

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#11 2015-07-30 22:49:20

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#12 2015-07-31 00:37:45

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#13 2015-07-31 06:50:11

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#14 2015-07-31 08:05:38

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#15 2015-07-31 14:37:51

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#16 2015-07-31 15:05:45

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

#17 2015-07-31 20:20:59

Re: Tips for tracking what websites users go on.

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