[K12OSN] Squid Question

[odonovan]

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---------- Original Message -----------
From: Lee Myrick <lee at renarts.org>
To: Ken Johnson <ken.tech1 at gmail.com>, "Support list for opensource software
in schools." <k12osn at redhat.com>
Sent: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:41:14 -0800
Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Squid Question

> I just set up Censornet on our network. Censornet basically IS Squid 
> and Dansguardian. I do run it on a separate machine, but it's an old 
> PIII right now. Works fine. Censornet's own documentation is quite 
> good on how to install. I'd say the choice factor between Censornet 
> and Squid/Dansguardian is how much you want to play with the system 
> yourself. With Censornet, you mostly can't go into a file with Vim 
> or Emacs and edit it, as it will be overwritten the next time you 
> start Censornet. Censornet is also free, although you can purchase 
> image-level filters and support (or donate to them once you're up 
> and running successfully).
> 
> Lee Myrick
> Information Technology Coordinator
> Renaissance Arts Academy
> lee at renarts.org
> http://www.renarts.org
> 
> On Mar 24, 2005, at 9:47 AM, Ken Johnson wrote:
> 


> > I need to filter Internet access for a k12LTSP network in a church 
> > youth center.

My experience comes form a school environment having deployed Squid,
SquidGuard and Dans and K12LTSP.  (I can't speak to Censornet or other
commercial products).
> >
> > I have a few questions. I am looking at Censornet, SquidGaurd and
> > DansGuardian. I have never used any of these before.
> >
> > 1) Does the proxy run on a separate machine, or should it run on the
> > k12LTSP server?
> >

Here are a few recommendations: 
Treat squid as your caching proxy having nothing to do with content filtering.
(in other words don't use SquidGuard (SG).  SG is a great URL filter and does
90% of what you want with low overhead.  But SG is NOT a content filter!  IMHO
SG isn't the tool for the job here.

Have squid set up to listen on the default port 3128 and only receive requests
from   the server. (This is the default K12LTSP config I believe.)

Dan's is a real content filter that can examine the content of pages on the
way through to the client (as well as doing the URL filtering that SC does.) 
It does this at the cost of some processing power needed from the server and
some additional latency for the processing. Dans home page gives the
additional processing and memory needs.  You should see if they can fit with
the specs of your server config.

Dans home page has lots of helpful documentation around installation (from
rpms so it comes up in a pretty ready default configuration).



> > 2) Can someone point me to some step by step installation instructions?
> >
Squid gets a small default installation accessable only from the server (which
is what you want) in the K12LTSP install.  You can adjust the size of the
cache (and many make many other config changes) in /etc/squid/squid.conf.
If you want to become more knowlegable about squid, check out the docs at
http://www.squid-cache.org  There's lots of documentation available there.

Dan's website http://dansguardian.org has a wealth of info about different
applications and configurations. 


> > 3) What are some pros and cons of each?
> >
Dans needs more proc/memory than SG but does more.  It needs more
configuration if you are going to do any degree of customization.

> > 4) Are any of these filters really effective  (after all its a church).
> 
I can volunteer that we have to loosen up on lots of the Dans configurations
in a public K12 environment.  Yes it is REALLY effective.


oo
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------- End of Original Message -------