[wplug] Linux "parental controls" solutions/appliances?
Chris Thomas
sruchris at gmail.com
Mon Aug 24 20:37:37 EDT 2009
Cobalt Raq2 (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260465205878)
= $40
Debain = Free
Squid = Free
SquidGuard = Free
DansGuardian = Free
Preventing your kids form seeing gotse = Priceless
-Chris
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 7:49 PM, Pat Barron<pat at tiderium.com> wrote:
> I was talking to a friend of mine, who is looking for some kind of
> "parental controls" network perimeter security solution. He has kids,
> and is concerned about what they do on the Internet - doesn't
> necessarily want to spy on everything, per se - but wants to be able to
> to log network activity (in terms of what sites are visited), maybe log
> IM traffic (if not the actual traffic, possibly just the users being
> communicated with, assuming whatever IM is in use isn't encrypted), and
> try to keep the kids in line just knowing the Big Brother is "out
> there". He's not really looking for something to be installed on each
> computer in the house (particularly since it's not necessarily
> guaranteed that all the computers in the house would be running
> Windows), but more like something that sits at the network perimeter,
> that everything has to pass through. I'm wondering if there are
> Linux-based solutions out there? I mean, pretty much anything you'd
> want to do along these lines, I imagine could be done with a combination
> of iptables and syslog. Is there maybe some kind of "appliance distro"
> for this - something that is (at least somewhat) turnkey, sort of the
> way "CA-in-a-Box" is, where you just install it, configure it, and go,
> and the box doesn't really get used for anything else aside from this
> function?
>
> I'd also sort of wondered if there was an hardware appliance solution
> for something like this, something that you could (for instance)
> re-flash a hackable Linksys (or Asus, or whatever) router with.
> Stumbling blocks I see to that would include the fact that the router
> couldn't really keep a lot of log information itself, and having to send
> log data to some kind of external syslog server or something means you
> need to have an additional box deployed on your internal network anyway,
> and the associated syslog traffic could chew up a lot of your internal
> network bandwidth.
>
> Thanks,
> --Pat.
>
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