I am using RH9 and want to know if there are any good and easy to set up parental control programs I can use so I can let my children use Linux and not need to worry about what they are looking at while surfing.

Moved thread to a more suitable forum, hopefully you'll get some responses from here! This isn't something I've seen discussed before so it could be interesting.

Jamie...

I haven't seen a single app solution for Linux/GNU that uses a combination of available URI listings, PICS rating and "bad words" lists. If you look at the products on lesser platforms like MICROS~1 they aren't exactly doing well rating sites, allowing access or even having an up to date URI database with all consequences. Any privacy promoting site has stories about those.

You listed " and easy to set up" as one of your requirements. does that mean a point-n-click interface is more important than a qualitatively good app? I think the fastest, safest and easiest (but not so funny) solution then would be to restrict access to what they are allowed to see.

OTOH if " and easy to set up" for you means being able to invest some time in configuring the app and updating rules, then have a look at Privoxy. It's the successor to the Junkbuster proxy.
Privoxy is a proxy meant to filter out ads, javascripts and more of the stuff that slows your surfing down, it doesn't utilize PICS ratings, nor does it come with a ready to use URI database. It does filter URI and page content very good (IMHO).
It has a local web interface where you can change settings (or restrict changing settings) and change and add filtering rules.
Make sure you have firewall rules that deny outbound access to all http/proxy ports except for the one you're running Privoxy on and make sure wget, links and lynx are configured for the proxy URI.

Just my 2 sheep.

hmmmm, luckily for you I bought LinuxUser & Developer the other day from WHSmiths. On the cd is something called CensorNet which I think is something you might be familiar with in the land of Miscrosoft.

It allows you to filter on url etc. and all that sort of stuff as well as limit bandwidth and set up a firewall. Look on the site for more features.

Take a look at www.censornet.com for info and the download.

HTH

Alex

P.S. w00t, 500 posts!!!

Thanks sorry it took so long to reply but unfortunately I have been busy lately.
Thanks again PM

I have just been told about a program called Dans Guardian which sounds like it would do what I want any advice on installing it on RH9 would be great.

I'm using Dan's Guardian on public internet kiosks (only testing stage currently) and it does what you need.
You can download the source from www.dansguardian.org
You need to be running squid (cache server)
I have squid listening on port 3128 for requests from DG. DG in turn listens on port 8080 for requests from the browser, which is set to use a proxy on localhost:8080

installation is reasonably straightforward. you can download an rh7 rpm or download the source and build it yourself. I'd recommend building it yourself... it's VERY straightforward, so don't be afraid. when you download the source and ungz and untar it, it'll have a README file in the folder it untars into. There are 3 steps you follow here, that, once done will build and install it. Once that's done, you need to edit dansguardian.conf to tell it what ports and so on to use.
There's a good forum on dansguardian.org for any problems you might have, but if there's anything I can help you with I'll do my best.

How can I tell if I already have squid installed and if not how can I tell if it is on one of my RH cds?

I gaurantee squid is on your RH disks. To see if it's installed already run "rpm -q squid"

Thanks Bulliver its not already installed so I will see if its on the cd. I have found it on the cd but now realised I do not know how to get it off the cd and installed sorry for being thick but what now?

The most direct way is to mount the cdrom, cd to the directory where the squid RPM package is, then run rpm -ivh squid.rpm (but use the actual package name...).

If you don't like the command line you can use the gui package manager to install it.. Here's some docs:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...kgs-cdrom.html

I haven't used rpm's in a while though, so perhaps someone else could elaborate/clarify my answer.

Looked in add/remove programs but can not find it to check the box to install. If I put one of the cds in i can see a squid icon so it must be there somewhere ?

This one may be a little diffrent
Take the output of and type "rpm -Uvh what ever ls *squid* told you it was"

There may be several rpms' that say "squid", type "rpm -qi name of package | less"