Filtering

[Blue_Cookeh]

Hey guys,

 

I'm sure this gets asked a lot but can I get some recommendations on filtering?

 

We're a kinda small primary school (120ish pupils) with a fairly advanced IT infrastructure (compared to other primaries around us) and I'm in the need for some kind of firewalling and URL filtering solution. The problem is they all seem to be over our budget by a fair amount, or free and kinda crappy.

 

Any one sitting on any golden gems? I've had quotes for Sophos and Smoothwall but are far too expensive for our small school. Coupled with this, I'm not particularly interested in a "4 hour pro support" type thing Sophos force upon you (Sophos looked so perfect!).

 

Unfortunatly, MS TMG was perfect but unfortunately we've renewed our EES licensing and thus lost it. I think I'm gonna end up using Dansguardian/Squid and IPTables at this rate...

 

Many thanks

Edited March 19, 2014 by Blue_Cookeh

[AdonMalik]

We've used ClearOS for years with decent success. It's not perfect but it's certainly better than manually configuring Squid, DansGuardian, and IPTables by hand. It can take a bit of tinkering to get everything to work exactly how you want sometimes but overall it's pretty easy to install and configure. You can purchase support as well so if that's in your budget it's always an option as well.

[synaesthesia]

Do your ISP not provide anything? Do you have anything else that would help bridge any gaps you may have, such as Impero? Certainly round this way, not many people would even think about getting a connection without some level of filtering, it's very much factored into the costing. The majority of solutions otherwise (sophos, smoothwall, lightspeed etc) all hit similar price figures and in many cases when it comes to internet safety, the advice I'd be handing my SMT around now is "suck it up".

[Blue_Cookeh]

We've used ClearOS for years with decent success. It's not perfect but it's certainly better than manually configuring Squid, DansGuardian, and IPTables by hand. It can take a bit of tinkering to get everything to work exactly how you want sometimes but overall it's pretty easy to install and configure. You can purchase support as well so if that's in your budget it's always an option as well.

 

Thanks, I'll give it a play around in a VM.

 

Do your ISP not provide anything? Do you have anything else that would help bridge any gaps you may have, such as Impero? Certainly round this way, not many people would even think about getting a connection without some level of filtering, it's very much factored into the costing. The majority of solutions otherwise (sophos, smoothwall, lightspeed etc) all hit similar price figures and in many cases when it comes to internet safety, the advice I'd be handing my SMT around now is "suck it up".

 

Our county is our ISP who use E2BN with Protex. We can't match their price since we're on 4 bonded ADSL lines (no access to fibre)... I hate Protex with a passion, maybe it's the county's implementation but we have absolutely no control over white/black lists. The reason I have in house filtering is so I can put everyone on the 'Staff' profile for basic E2BN filtering and do the rest ourselves. The only thing our county provides is ISA 2006, so we can upstream to their proxy.

[synaesthesia]

Ouch, I feel your pain

[JPElectron]

We use this: DNS Redirector - Captive Portal and Internet Filtering software that's scalable and network friendly - requires no subscription if you run it on your own server in-house.

[clodhopper]

Have a chat with the guys at Censornet.com. We currently use it and very pleased with it