Lockdown
The kids are broadening their web surfing habits to include "inappropriate" content. I knew this would happen sooner or later and decided to take preemptive action.
First I created a 'kids' account on all three of our household desktop computers (my Linux machine, Barb's Mac, and the kids' old Mac). Then I changed their Firefox network settings to use a web proxy and pointed the proxy to our basement Linux server. I installed
squid on the server. Squid is a popular web proxy and cache that has nice access control features. Now all the HTTP requests for the kids' desktops go through this basement server. The adult's accounts go directly to the Internet, bypassing this proxy.
Finally, in the squid settings on the server I only allowed access to about a dozen or so sites. (Some of the kids' sites like
Webkinz jump to a numeric IP address when you go to login, so I also added a bunch of class-B subnets to catch these.) The nice thing about using a centralized proxy server for access control is that I can use one site list for all the computers in the house. I also get an access log if I'm so inclined.
The result is that the kids are pretty much locked down in their surfing, as long as they use Firefox and as long as they don't get wise enough to bypass the proxy. I figure that if they are savvy enough to do this, then we really don't need to block content any more.
The only downside is that right now I need to manually add addresses to the 'good' list on the server. This involves ssh-ing to the server, su-ing, vim-ing, etc. These are things that Barb isn't up to. So I might take an hour or two to put together a simple CGI app to manage the allowable sites list.
Jim on 04.05.08 @ 03:28 PM ET [
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