Caching Websites

[liamvaughan]

Hello all,

 

I’ve been asked by our Head Of IT for some kind of Caching software, basically because we use the LEA for the internet and filtering we have limited control over the filtering of the students, so the Head Of IT wants us to be able to disable internet access on their accounts but them still to access the sites he puts on the intranet sorry if it doesn’t make any since but I really don’t know where to start has anyone got anything similar.

 

Thanks for the help.

[dhicks]

I’ve been asked by our Head Of IT for some kind of Caching software

 

SmoothWall is probably what you want:

 

Express Open Source Firewall Project

 

That will alow you to filter websites. There's a free version or a paid-for version with support and more features. SmoothWall actually sponser a forum here, so you can generally get help if you need it.

 

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David Hicks

[robk]

That sounds like you want to put students on "white list" filtering. Most filtering/classroom management tools should allow you to do this.

[glennda]

You could look at something along the lines of squid and dansguardian running on a linux host - its way smoothwall is based on but if your linux skills are not 100% then something like smoothie express is really quite good.

[liamvaughan]

Thanks all, Smoothwall is a more filtering software really isnt it, we do use AB Tutor but its only per machine not student so when the students move classes they get the normal internet back not our intranet sort of speak, as anyone ever used squid did read about that before do you think this would be the best solution, its a werid situation I really don't know were to start

[dhicks]

Smoothwall is a more filtering software really isnt it

 

Ah, just realised what you're trying to do - have a local copy of a website that you can let pupils use while their Internet access is otherwise disabled. As pointed out above, what you actually want is a whitelist system, where you can say "this pupil is allowed to visit sites X, Y and Z and nothing else". Trying to locally cache modern websites is going to be a bit of a task, filtering systems are a somewhat more standard solution these days and you'll be able to get more help setting one up.

 

as anyone ever used squid did read about that before do you think this would be the best solution

 

You can get Squid to do what you want, but I seem to remember getting it to act as a transparent proxy involved recompiling it from source. To actually cache the sites you want, a wget cron job is probably easiest.

 

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David Hicks