mindfulity is a program to block specified servers within defined
time ranges.
mindfulity requires Python 2 (tested on Python 2.7). This should already
be installed on your system.
In the directory into which you extracted mindfulity, run:
sudo ./install.sh
This will install the mindfulity script into /usr/local/bin/mindfulity,
the configuration file into /usr/local/etc/mindfulity.conf, and a
crontab fragment to run mindfulity into /etc/cron.d.
To use the program, you will want to define some blocking rules. Run
sudo nano /usr/local/etc/mindfulity.conf
(replacing nano with your preferred editor).
Reading the comments, you can probably copy and modify one of the example rules to suit your needs; see the next section for more details.
Each line in the configuration file is either:
- A blank line or comment (starting with
#), which is ignored - A rule
A rule consists of six fields:
- The domain to block
- The hour and minute at which to start blocking (these are separate fields)
- The hour and minute at which to stop blocking (these are separate fields)
- The days on which to block
So a single rule looks something like this:
example.com 19 00 08 15 0,1,2,3,4
Taking that apart:
example.com is the domain to block.
19 is the hour-part of when to start blocking
00 is the minute-part of when to start blocking
Taken together, those give 19:00 (7pm)
08 and 15 are similarly the hour and minute part
of when to stop blocking (8:15am).
0,1,2,3,4 specifies that the rule should only apply on
weekdays (Monday-Friday). This field contains a comma-separated
list of day numbers; days are numbered from 0 (Monday) through
6 (Sunday).
For more examples, see the comments in the provided configuration file.
Each time the script is run, it applies the blocks that should be currently active. To keep these up-to-date, the script needs to be regularly re-run.
This is accomplished automatically by a cron job, specified
by the crontab fragment in mindfulity.cron, which is copied
to /etc/cron.d/mindfulity by the install script.
The provided crontab fragment will apply the rules every fifteen minutes, and on boot.
If you think that the script is not working correctly, the first thing to check is that there are no problems with the configuration file. Try running
mindfulity check
That will read the configuration file, and print out all the rules it finds. If there are any syntax errors in the file, this will print out an error message with a brief description of the error, and the line number on which it was found.
If that looks good, try running
sudo mindfulity
That will apply the currently-active rules. If the blocking behaviour is wrong before running this command, but correct afterwards, then the cron job is not running the script at the approppriate time---see above, in the section "Cron setup".
Finally, you can look in the file /etc/hosts. This is
the file that mindfulity modifies to block particular
domains. If blocks should be currently active, there
should be a line for each domain to be blocked, which
ends with a comment containing just mindfulity. So if you
were blocking example.com, there would be a line
127.0.0.1 example.com # mindfulity
At the end of /etc/hosts.
If you are having trouble with mindfulity, you can run
sudo mindfulity clear
to remove any rules that mindfulity has applied. This is also what mindfulity will do if it is run automatically and encounters an error with the configuration file.
Of course, if mindfulity is being run by a cron job, that will quickly revert the situation back to that specified by the configuration file unless you disable it.