Linux Firewall + website blocking

hallows1 · 03-25-2007, 05:53 AM

I am looking at creating a linux box to be my firewall, plus i need to be able to block a few websites as I have got a brother that likes to look at bad sites and a daughter that will not stay off msn. Can someone please help me ASAP

win32sux · 03-25-2007, 12:15 PM

what distro are you using?? how much experience with this kinda stuff do you have?? what you want could be achieved with either iptables/netfilter (firewall) or squid (proxy)... or optimally, a combination of both... do you already have squid installed?? pretty much any generic distro will have iptables/netfilter by default...

gtjr92 · 03-25-2007, 12:46 PM

I am no expert but I just installed ipcop and added the cop+/dan's guardian addon and it works pretty well, even on older pc's.
You can configure it from a browser which makes it easy to manage.
I have heard good things about smoothwall too but not sure which is better or why

win32sux · 03-25-2007, 12:52 PM

yeah, only reason i didn't suggest it earlier was because for blocking "a few websites" dansguardian would be overkill... but if you do indeed want to do content filtering then it's great... are you looking to use your favorite generic distro for this?? or are you planning on using a specialized firewall distro, as mentioned by gtjr92??

hallows1 · 03-25-2007, 11:21 PM

I would prefer to use debian linux if possible, how would i go about downloading, installing and configuring dansguardian and ipcop?

win32sux · 03-25-2007, 11:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hallows1

I would prefer to use debian linux if possible, how would i go about downloading, installing and configuring dansguardian and ipcop?

ipcop is a distro in and of itself, available here...

installing dansguardin on debian should be as simple as:

Code:

apt-get install dansguardian

as for configuration, there's tons of documentation on the web... the dansguardian web page might be a good place to start... FWIW, i can say that dansguardian can be setup without a lot of fuss - it's pretty straight-forward...