On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 12:21 -0400, michael hast wrote:
> Hey, everybody. I just set up a Knoppix-box in my six-year-old's
> room. Needless to say, he's thrilled. I know that there's a bunch of
> garbage on the net that is unfit for little eyes, and I don't want to
> have to be answering tough questions too soon. What is the
> best/easiest/most secure way I can give him internet access under strict
> control without literally watching over his shoulder? He only ever
> really goes to a handful of websights that are educational or game
> related, and I want him to feel free and unrestricted with it, and I
> want to be able to add more access as root as he matures and developes
> proficiency with Linux. Does anybody have the solution that I'm looking
> for? So far, he's fairly content with the slew of games that I
> installed on the machine, but he's asking more and more when he'll get
> internet and email.
Well after reading the rebuttal of the rebuttal of the.....ahh
whatever... :^)
Robert's going to think that I'm even more nutz.... My Son will be 4 in
January and he already goes to playhouse disney and NickJr.com and a few
others with my wife on our SuSE box. Currently it is all supervised but
our office is in our room and he consistently wants to use the computer
(at 3 1/2 mind you...but the kid's a genius). He has a chart right now
that if he gets 30 stars on, at the end of this month he gets a
Computer. At work I use Squid as a proxy content filter for our
network. Zoltan suggested Dans Guardian which is built on Squid and I
can tell you that Squid with an updated blacklist works almost too well.
It can filter on keywords in a url/domain or by the whole domain itself.
You can stop downloads of specific file extentions and even control what
time the internet is available. While I agree with the fact that it is
no replacement for good old fashioned supervision, it can definately
prevent unwanted things from coming across the web even during
supervision. This is the route we plan on taking whenever we eventually
hook up the web for him. It will only have internet access during
certain times of the day and will have constantly updated blacklists.
You can track what is allowed and blocked through the log files. If you
are still feeling green to linux, Check out webmin. While I don't
prefer the whole web panel admin thing, ( for more reasons than the
security issues ) webmin has a utility for setting up squid and I
believe even a gui log viewer for it. It does about a billion other
things too. Great tool to start with and then you can uninstall it
later after you browse the conf files and get used to what's going on
behind the scenes. Remember that while it can configure everything for
you, view logs and start the service, it doesn't install the program.
You need to have squid installed separately.
Even so, we still haven't made any final decisions and the end resting
place of the computer may be in a common area rather than the room. I'm
still gonna use squid though!!! ;^)
Mike Branda Jr.
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