[wplug] Linux "parental controls" solutions/appliances?

[Ben Beige]

opendns is also an option http://opendns.org


Ben Beige
dariuscardren at gmail.com



On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Chris Thomas<sruchris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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