The OPENDNS software *may* also report the subnet IP addresses of the individual PCs and their outbound urls. dunno yet ‘cuz I can’t register it yet . grumble.
But I must add that your valid idea to “configure an instance of linux to be your local router (using iptables), and have your hand-built router create the log files” is well beyond my ability and interest level. My brother who is a MSE could do that, but not me ;-)
How hard can it be to get software that reports out in a simple dashboard “what urls did my various PCs go to, and when?”
harrumph
;-)
OpenDNS can only report what it knows about your network. Using mine as an example, the inside network is a bunch of 192.168.0. addresses. OpenDNS knows nothing about this. However, OpenDNS can know about every request outbound from here, which is on a totally different network (that is, the address that web hosts get our browse requests from is more like 72.xxx.xxx.xxx).
In other words, the outbound "URLs" of the all the machines on your home network is probably the same, that being the (external) IP address of your cable modem.
-- How hard can it be to get software that reports out in a simple dashboard "what urls did my various PCs go to, and when?" --
Not too. I think there are quite a few products that do this. If you don't need a report that tells which machine on your network made each web visit, then all you need is a way to convert the IP addresses in the Linksys/CISCO report into names.
Come to think of it, a report from your router will probably contain internal machine identities. Wallwatcher takes activity information provided by the router (if the router does such). It looks like just what you want. As for ending support, that just means the author or company is planning to "move on." If the software does what you want, you don't care about "improvements and support."