From the O’Reilly ebook, Asterisk, The Future of Telephony:
Page 200 (218 in adobe)
Managing teenagers’ calls
How about allocating a specific phone-time limit to your teenages ? To us the phone, they have to enter their access codes. They can earn extra minutes by doing chores, scoring all As, dumping that annoying bum with the bad haircut— you get the idea. Once they’ve used up their minutes… click … you get your phone back.
It goes on, but gives NO details on how to accomplish. Anyone out there do something similar ? I have just been messing around with Authenticate() and VMauthenticate(), but have not even come close yet.
I would like to have user prompted for vmpassword or exten & vmpasswrod if it is not their extension. eithr for all calls or all outside calls. I think I can set up the time of day limits if it is not there yet.
However, I am not sure how to go about limiting the minutes “used” for the day by any given teen (user). Is there a total minutes used for the day function ?
you could try a calling card app like A2Billing (Asterisk2Billing). This lets you set up accounts, and each account has a balance which can be used or recharged. You can assign accounts to extensions so use of that extension to make certain calls (IE only external calls) counts against their account. You can also create ‘recharge codes’ to simplify your life, so you dont have to log in all the time but can instead give out a code or two to let users self-recharge their accounts. Once used, the recharge codes become worthless. Users can log into A2billing using a web interface and their PIN code to check their account balance and apply recharge codes online if they prefer.
Users from other extens can dial an access code and their PIN, to make calls on their account. This system is very commonly used to run calling card systems and might be suitable for your needs.
You can use VMAuthenticate or something like it to control access, but that wont control overall usage, just prevent who is allowed to use the thing.
That said, I would suggest consider very carefully what you are trying to do. While you may see this as taking control of your phone bill or getting your kids to go outside (perfectly good ideas), they will see it as something far worse- at best an invasion of their privacy, at worst a dictator-like control where their own opinions have no value. Remember, while they may appear to be wild/nuts/moronic, kids are people too, and have their own opinions (which may and probably will differ from yours). The “annoying bum with the bad haircut” may be a good friend of somebody’s, even if it does not appear to be so.
My only point here is that 99 times out of 100, discussion and compromise is far better than strict, technology-assisted control (short version- talk to your kids, and don’t preach or dictate, listen to them). There are of course legit uses for such a thing, which is why I answered the question, but I would encourage you to (if this is the case) strongly consider if applying such a thing to your own kids is actually required.
(and for the record- i do not usually include such rants with my posts. However I believe that technology like this is power, and with any power comes responsibility. I believe the first step in discovering if one CAN do a thing, should be deciding if one SHOULD do a thing. I would never help a criminal set up * to appear as a fake bank and steal people’s credit card numbers, same principle applies. I am helping you because I am hoping you have a good use for this thing.)