Hi,
I installed a network of five desktops in a small town hall, all running CentOS 5.4. The machines are publicly, and the mayor asked me to find some solution to effectively filter web content, as the kids' first reflex is to visit the interesting bits of the Internet first, from satanism to porn.
One of the machines will be set up as a router anyway, since the public computer room gets its internet access from the town hall, and I've decided to make another subnet for it.
Any recommendations for that?
Niki
Niki Kovacs wrote:
Hi,
I installed a network of five desktops in a small town hall, all running CentOS 5.4. The machines are publicly, and the mayor asked me to find some solution to effectively filter web content, as the kids' first reflex is to visit the interesting bits of the Internet first, from satanism to porn.
One of the machines will be set up as a router anyway, since the public computer room gets its internet access from the town hall, and I've decided to make another subnet for it.
Any recommendations for that?
Niki
I have DansGuardian set up on my home Linux server that acts as the router for our home network, and it does a great job of web filtering on the fly. (I have grade school kids at home). You basically configure a transparent proxy so all HTTP traffic is filtered, and it's configurable as to what categories you want to allow or block. I use RPMs available from RPMForge.
http://dansguardian.org/ http://packages.sw.be/dansguardian/
-Greg
On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 17:22 +0100, Niki Kovacs wrote:
Any recommendations for that?
Hi,
I installed a network of five desktops in a small town hall, all running CentOS 5.4. The machines are publicly, and the mayor asked me to find some solution to effectively filter web content, as the kids' first reflex is to visit the interesting bits of the Internet first, from satanism to porn.
Satanism? What, you're going to filter all religion?
You could set up the browsers with filters - even google has "safe search", and you could set the browser options to be read-only, so no user can change it.
One of the machines will be set up as a router anyway, since the public computer room gets its internet access from the town hall, and I've decided to make another subnet for it.
Any recommendations for that?
Sorry, haven't been involved with filtering.
For that matter, is this *only* for children? If not, then the mayor is depriving the adult users of their rights of free speech (assuming this is in the US).
mark
On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 11:31 -0500, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
For that matter, is this *only* for children? If not, then the mayor is depriving the adult users of their rights of free speech (assuming this is in the US).
mark
--- Well well, you see in my type of IT I work in you Sign Away those First Amendment Rights before you even go to work for said company that I work for. I live in the US and Work in the US. Matter of fact our email policy is for internal use only and for work purposes only and logged for to and from destinations. People have been fired because of this.
John
m.roth@5-cent.us a écrit :
Satanism? What, you're going to filter all religion?
Let's say www.rotten.com is still a favourite among the local youngsters. Not exactly family-friendly. (When I was that age, long before the Internet became popular, we only had "Faces Of Death" on VHS :oD)
For that matter, is this *only* for children? If not, then the mayor is depriving the adult users of their rights of free speech (assuming this is in the US).
No, I'm in South France, and the only people complaining about free speech are the odd negationists, skinheads and other various nazi folks.
The computer room is a public commodity for everyone. So even if an adult person is using the computer to peruse www.cumshotfiesta.com or the likes, this would probably incommodate other town hall visitors with children.
But I've done some research on my own in the meanwhile, I already have Squid running on one of my test boxes, and I think Squidguard will do the job.
Cheers from the snowy South of France,
Niki
m.roth@5-cent.us a écrit :
Satanism? What, you're going to filter all religion?
Let's say www.rotten.com is still a favourite among the local youngsters. Not exactly family-friendly. (When I was that age, long before the Internet became popular, we only had "Faces Of Death" on VHS :oD)
True. But then, here in the US, varieties of Paganism are equated with Satanism by the extremist fundamentalist Christians, and they'd want them blocked (and before you think I'm exaggerating, let me note that a month or so ago, the US Air Force Academy dedicated a small ring on its grounds for Pagans... and within a couple of days, it was vandalized by "good Christians". So, being from France, I'd expect you to understand anti-clericalism. <g>
For that matter, is this *only* for children? If not, then the mayor is depriving the adult users of their rights of free speech (assuming this is in the US).
No, I'm in South France, and the only people complaining about free speech are the odd negationists, skinheads and other various nazi folks.
*sigh* Yeah. They pull that here, too, and then complain if the other side gets a word in.
The computer room is a public commodity for everyone. So even if an adult person is using the computer to peruse www.cumshotfiesta.com or the likes, this would probably incommodate other town hall visitors with children.
I can see that. That kind of filtering is pretty standard in US libraries; unfortunately, they're almost exclusively Windows....
But I've done some research on my own in the meanwhile, I already have Squid running on one of my test boxes, and I think Squidguard will do the job.
Good deal.
Cheers from the snowy South of France,
Back at you from sunny Washington, DC, USA
mark
m.roth@5-cent.us a écrit :
True. But then, here in the US, varieties of Paganism are equated with Satanism by the extremist fundamentalist Christians, and they'd want them blocked (and before you think I'm exaggerating, let me note that a month or so ago, the US Air Force Academy dedicated a small ring on its grounds for Pagans... and within a couple of days, it was vandalized by "good Christians". So, being from France, I'd expect you to understand anti-clericalism. <g>
My little town has a population of 900 or so, and from what I see, there are only two religions here : the local football team Olympique de Marseille, and the monthly bull chase through the streets.
I'll make sure to put the relevant websites on my filtering proxy's whitelist :o)
Niki
On 3/9/2010 11:44 AM, Niki Kovacs wrote:
The computer room is a public commodity for everyone. So even if an adult person is using the computer to peruse www.cumshotfiesta.com or the likes, this would probably incommodate other town hall visitors with children.
But I've done some research on my own in the meanwhile, I already have Squid running on one of my test boxes, and I think Squidguard will do the job.
I think squidguard just blocks known-bad URLs. There's also http://dansguardian.org/?page=whatisdg for content filtering.
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Frank Cox -
Greg Bailey -
JohnS -
Les Mikesell -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
Niki Kovacs