Filtering home Internet access with Squid

Pre-Configured Filters

Many commercial filtering solutions are based on Squid. Although they are not available under free licenses, and even cost money in some cases, the advantage is that they give you daily updated, graduated filter lists that offer excellent protection.

Free filter lists such as the SquidGuard [5] lists are also available.

Conclusions

The Squid proxy server system lets you keep control of Internet traffic – even on a small, home-sized network. If necessary, Squid will act as a transparent proxy that you do not need to configure explicitly on the browser side. Squid also offers simple traffic shaping – that is, the ability to assign bandwidth to clients based on a set of rules.

Infos

  1. Squid: http://www.squid-cache.org
  2. Squid configuration file: http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v2/2.6/cfgman/
  3. Privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/
  4. Regular expressions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_Expression
  5. SquidGuard: http://www.squidguard.org/blacklists.html

The Author

Florian Effenberger is the OpenOffice.org international Marketing Project Co-Lead and marketing contact for German-speaking countries. He is a member of the NGO OpenOffice.org Germany. In addition to his work with OpenOffice, Florian specializes in designing and managing open source--based school networks.

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