Parentware
Parentware is less of a single piece of software and more of a collection of configs, bash scripts, & cronjobs used for managing what times a child, or yourself, is allowed to use a linux machine.
Key Features
- Prevent a linux user from logging on outside of certain time periods
- Log users out according to PAM time config
My Role
Developer & Hated Sibling
Technologies Used
- Bash
- Cronjobs
- PAM
- PAM Time
Purpose
My sibling has a low power laptop which was running very slowly with windows 11 so I decided to install a linux distro on it. However this came with a problem, screentime. They were using their laptop late into the night causing sleep and mood issues. So I decided to write some "software" that could address this issue while I wait for Gnome to introduce better parental controls.
This project is still in development and will eventually have the source code published. I'm currently looking into writing a daemon for logging out users instead of root cronjobs however if I do that I have to support more features of PAM time that I am not sure how to do yet.
My Brag of the Project
I guess my brag for this project will be that I used many commandline tools instead of a programming language, apart from bash. I used tools like grep and awk for parsing the config file which was fun.
Lessons Learned
- How linux does authentication via PAM modules
- What a lot of the files in the root directory are for
- Commandline tools that I now use regularly, mainly grep