Filtering home Internet access with Squid
Blacklists
Even if your kids keep to the times that they are allowed to surf the web, you will not want them accessing sites with pornographic or violent content.
To place websites off limits, you just need to add a couple of lines to your Squid configuration file (see Listing 7) then add entries with strings describing the web content you want to block to the /usr/share/squid/blacklist file (see Listing 8); regular expressions [4] are supported.
Finally, type /etc/init.d/squid reload to tell the proxy to parse the blacklist.
Listing 7
Place websites off limits
Listing 8
Block web content
Custom Blacklists
Of course, Squid will let you assign different blacklists to different users. For example, Simon is allowed to browse online auctions, whereas Tanja is still too young for such things. To set this up, just assign the blacklist in Listing 8 as /usr/share/squid/blacklist_tanja.
The example blocks pages that contain the prohibited text. To define more precise filters, you can use regular expressions, but don't rely blindly on the list; it makes far more sense to check at regular intervals to see whether it still has the desired effect. And remember that server and file names do change.
Whitelists
Another approach to filtering, and one that is far more strict, is to use whitelists. If you prefer to restrict Tanja's access to just one or a few sites, a whitelist is probably a good idea. Just add the lines in Listing 9 to your Squid configuration and create a whitelist to match. The syntax is similar to that of the blacklist; however, whitelisting can cause problems when a single website references content from many other locations.
To display the complete page, you would need to list these sites explicitly.
Listing 9
Adding a Whitelist
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