Hi,
I'm having here at home one quite addicted Farmville & similar game player which I would like to somewhat control in at least late night/early morning hours, which is why I'm once again asking for your help.

Was browsing a while around for a program which could be used as a webpage blocker for several hours (predefined time), but all I came up was either scripts which I don't understand (I myself can be counted as a newbie in Linux stuff) and don't want to risk blindly or just user account time manager (timekpr).

I found a great solution in my case for MacOS users called SelfControl, but as you can guess ... there's no Linux native client for that ...

So, my question is - is there any easy and understandable way to block specific webpages for a predefined time period (let's say, every morning from 03:00CET - 08:00CET)?

OS: Ubuntu 9.10
Computer knowledge of the farmer: Getting on Farmville and/or playing Gnome's Mahjongg is pretty much all.

Hmm.

You're a farmer and I'm a dude... :O)

You could do the following:

- create two batch files
- batch file one blocks the sites in question
- batch file two unblocks the lot
- have crontab execute batch file one at 3 AM
- have crontab execute batch file two at 9 AM

Not sure yet what to put in the batch files.... You could disable the full network access by killing eth0. But you could also use the batch files to change the file /etc/hosts

If in /etc/hosts a URL is listed, the Linux system will go there first. If in /etc/hosts a URL does nto exist, it starts consulting DNS-es. So if you put the line
in the hosts file, The site www.gameplay.eu is related to a non existing webpage on your local machine.

Another dirty trick is to mount a timer in front of your router. At 3 AM, the timer powers down the router and at 8 AM it applies power again.... Not handy if you phone with VOIP.

Well, thanks for the reply, but there is a little problem - I myself am not really far away from being close to absolute newbie in Linux things, so creating batch files or scripts is definitely not the thing which I understand and can do without bunch of silly mistakes ...

If there would be an explanation (specifically for people who still don't know where is what and how is that working at all) on how to make those crontabs and other mentioned stuff, I'd like to try that one out!

P.S.
I have no router here - some time ago I asked for help to connect two computers together to Internet via one cable and through one computer ..

Simpler solution:

My son asked me to change his Facebook password - at least until school finals were over

Just a thought .. PSM