How to setup Restrictive Internet Access

[Osyris]

Let me start off saying, I am not sure this is the right forum; I couldn't find a specific one that would fit my question. Mods plz move if you have a better idea.

OK. I work for a small company as their I.S. Manager. We currently have ~40 inhouse patients that we attend to. They often request day passes to go to the library and use their internet service. I have brought up the question of having internet available to them here inhouse, however I am stumped as to how to keep them away from inapropriate web sites.

I have heard of many programs that do this, often they base their blocking on words that are contained in the page, however I don't think they will block pictures. I have thought about turning DNS off on the machine and setting up specific sites within the hosts file, unfortunately this would take forever and wouldn't allow the users to browse much.

Anyone have any ideas. Good software or maybe another solution?

 

[DaHitman]

Eaisest way is to use a Linux or BSD web proxy server and using one of the many free systems on Linux and BSD to this sort of thing.. and most of them are also internet "caches" which will speed thing up and use less bandwith.

Here are a few good ones:

http://dansguardian.org/?page=whatisdg
http://www.squidguard.org/


Squid Guard is nice because it doesn't do "keywords" or stuff like that... it has a "black list" maintained by volunteers of sites in different categories... so instead of blocking the word "breast" and not being able to read sites about "breast canser", they blacklist the site of "booties are us" specifically.. etc.. its not perfect, and some things will go throught with the lag between being created by porn providers and getting on the black list but its more fair and less likely to cause concerns about abitrary censorship.

I would also suggest you think about going to have a unique userid and password for each user.. know that every site you go to can be associated with your login, makes people behave better.

 

[cleverhandle]

The two programs DaHitman mentioned are actually designed to work together, and they do a pretty good job of it. Squid acts as a caching proxy and also blocks sites on its blacklists. DansGuardian does regular expression searches on the page contents so that the blocked sites are not limited solely to the blacklists - very, very useful for huge sites like yahoo which might have only small sections that you want to block. I set up a test system at home, and it does a far better (i.e. more appropriate) filtering of sites than the expensive commercial system, also based on Squid, that we use at work (a high school).

 

[Osyris]

Well the two ideas are nice and all but, this isn't really a big corporate thing. I only really want to filter content to the one maching. So I guess Software is my only way to go? More than likely I would be using Win2K on the box. It is what I am more familiar with. I am not really a Linux fan (Past infestations of linux have pissed me off too much to even learn). So I guess Netsitter or Cyber-Watcher are really my only choices.