Why am I using SquidGuard?

Having children in the house, I would like them to be able to browse the internet as safely as possible, and block as many offensive sites as possible. After a bit of looking around, I decided on the combination of squid (http://www.squid-cache.org) and SquidGuard (http://squidguard.org/index.html).

I’ve used squid before and it is really easy to set up and use.  There are a huge number of options, but the default settings work well enough without doing too much.  There are also lots of recipes available that other people have taken the time to write, so help is always at hand.

Again most (if not all) Linux distributions provide a ready packaged Squid distribution, so the amount of effort required to install it rally is minimal.

If you are running a small home network, then you only need to install this on one machine and tell every other machine to use it.  This can be done automatically – more on this in another post.

To provide protection against unsuitable sites, I pair Squid with SquidGuard. The way this works is that Squid passes every link to every page requested to SquidGuard.  SquidGuard examines this link  and compares it to its database (more on this later) of unsuitable sites. If it finds a match it returns a replacement URL which Squid then returns to the user.

Continue reading Automatically updating squidGuard black and white lists →