Friday, July 6. 2007
New Filtering Software
At work we have two levels of filtering, filtering at county level. It's good at picking up proxy bypass web sites but that's about it. So in school we have an RM provided solution called RM Smart Cache. Now it's good in some respects, but unfortunately has it's down falls.
Previously I used Censornet, this product does exactly what it says on the tin. It filters the Internet and it does it good! All users get presented with a log in box when they try to browse the Internet. This if your auditing trail of who has done what on the Internet. Now the old version used to be a single CD that was the install and it all worked straight out of the box. But with the new V4 it's a little bit more in depth. Which from my point of view is good. With the old version you couldn't do anything else with the box. But with the new version it's a basic install of Debian and then away you go.
So before installing the Censornet software I made a few changes to the install, first a static IP address. A quick edit of the interfaces file and we now have a static IP address. SSH access has also been enabled, and SNMP monitoring support has also been installed so we can monitor the server through Cacti.
To install Censornet we need to edit the sources.list file, and to add the line that points to the Censornet servers. This is also the perfect time to comment out the line that points to the install CD. Once saved and you have run apt-get update, you can then run "apt-get install cnv4"
And away we go on the install of Censornet V4. It will automatically install everything that is needed, Apache, Squid etc. IT will take about 5 minutes on a good spec machine. After a little setting up of the system it's now been running in school since Wednesday. I'm really pleased with it. With the couple of problems I have had with it support have been amazing with helping, (Neil Briscoe you have been awesome at answering so quickly!)
Time for some screen shots!
So this is the service monitor. You can at a quick glance make sure everything is running how it is. You can see Active Connections and also unfortunately Unblock Requests. In the previous versions you could remove this button from the blocked page. But it's pretty much been hard coded in the current version. I'm awaiting an answer on how to remove it!
Here is the Activity monitor. A quick glance at what has been happening in the past hour. Again this appears on the front page along with Service Monitor. It's actually really useful to see what is going on with your Internet connection at a glance.
All in all I'm really pleased with the new version. And we've just purchased it for the school. I'd recommend it for any school that needs a secure Internet filtering package. It's one of the best I've found so far!