I sure this question has been asked before but I have been looking for it for sometime and can't really find what im looking for or a setup that is more complex than what is required.

I'm a parent that is looking to keep my kids from viewing pages they shouldn't. I was looking into setting up a squid proxy server with fedora or any distro. I dont need http cashing or ssl tunneling or complex stuff like that. I'm just looking to filter out bad web pages for a 'family safe network' and maybe denying chat programs like AOL and MSN in the after hours so my kids wont be chatting at 2 am. If anybody can give me a link to a easy howto I would be very grateful.

Kyle

I don't know about easy links, but the web filtering can be done with a proxy and Dan's Guardian. I haven't actually set this up, but a buddy of mine did for his kids (mine is only 18 months, so I have a while to figure it out).

I believe any old firewall should be able to block ports by hour. And I feel like my Linksys WRT54G router had a page that could deny internet access according to the time of day. But again, I haven't taken the time to set it up...

Another option is to set up a cron job to bring the network down between certain hours. If they don't have root access, they won't be able to bring it back up...

if you have a spare machine i'd strongly suggest an ipcop installation, with the dansguardian addon added on... http://www.dageek.co.uk/ipcop/addonz/dansguardian.htm also there's the urlfilter module http://www.urlfilter.net/ which seems to do *some* time based restrictions too.

Thank you for your quick replies! IpCop with the DansGuardian seems like a good bet.

Kyle