One of my old employers had a watchguard firewall and I believe it logged DNS requests. I remember I could see what web sites our employees were browsing. I now want something similar for my house, to see what sites my kids have been browsing. I don't want parent controls on the PC itself, because I want my son to install his own operating systems and stuff.

The last time I used Linux was about 6 years ago, but I'd like to give it another try at home. I'd like it to run on as small and quiet of PC as possible, with no keyboard and mouse, and access it's log directory over the network from a Windows PC.

If there's a cheap hardware router/firewall that already does this, or even windows software, I'd like to know that too. I think the watchguard firewall I used was over $1,000.


Thanks,

Ray Metz

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 53 -j LOG --log-prefix "DNS-Traffic(tcp):"
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j LOG --log-prefix "DNS-Traffic(udp):"

Those two iptables commands will dump all traffic on port 53 to your syslog, which you could then monitor for "bad sites".

For a more complex and complete solution(including blocking) you could look into setting up a transparent proxy with squid.