Hi there,

I have tried to build a secure laptop for my 9 year old daughter to enable her to do schoolwork and browse the web for the usual things that 9 year old girls find interesting. I have failed to get squid proxy and blacklists configured correctly - due to my lack of knowledge.

I have a laptop with OpenSuSE 11.1 but i am not wedded to this. I would quite happily download a precondifured ISO of any linux with internally redirected web browser to go through a proxy and web filter on the same machine to stop all the nasty stuff appearing.

I dont want to set up an external proxy/filter on another machine or on my router. I am quite happy that she will not be able to hack a local setup, and if or when she does then I will cross that bridge when i come to it.

Any suggestions guys? Any help appreciated.

Kind regards

Q

Did you looked at squid and squidguard?

Hello and Welcome to LQ,

Have at look at this thread and this article. I'd check out the OpenDNS option since it's 'portable' wherever your daughter takes her laptop.

Kind regards,

Eric

Yes, I did look at squid and squidguard. I installed them from the app manager in openSuSE 11.1 but after following the configuration guides I could still browse to playboy.com (my standard test for blocked site access).

If it was on a seperate machine I am sure I could get it working, I used to build and configure Novell BorderManager and am quite okay with the logical traffic paths and concepts of redirection and filtering but the config instructions just dont seem to work for me.

Kind regards

Q

Thanks EricTRA

I will check out the thread and look at the products suggested.

Much appreciated.

Q

take a look at privoxy.. http://www.privoxy.org/ ...it will do the job
http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/actions-file.html

Are you sure you want to blacklist? With a nine year old, I'd think whitelisting would be much better. I set up Squid to whitelist on my friend's PC a little while ago. He has a nine year old daughter too. I made it so that only specific children's sites (as well as a few educational ones) would work. The only application we used was Squid, nothing else.

But, what exactly was wrong? Did the browser not use squid or was squid not configured to block the site(s) that you wanted to block? Without knowing which problem you had, I don't think a fix is likely to be forthcoming.

If you think security is best in layers (& it is), using this as well as OpenDNS would be good.

Are you defining 'secure' as 'with website blocking' and prepared to ignore other potential security aspects?

I would suggest using Firefox with Glubble as well as OpenDNS. With Glubble you can whitelist the sites you feel OK with a child viewing, and just to be on the safe side since kids are darn smart use OpenDNS to block sites that are unsafe.

Do the OpenDNS restrictions only work if you access domains? If you use Squid for this, it's a piece of cake to make sure the child is completely unable to send any packets out to the Internet on her own. One single iptables command will force the child to go through Squid, and therefore be subject to your access control lists. Example:The only way for her to surf the Web would be via Squid on localhost.