Content Filtering with IPCop & squidGuard

So the day has finally come… my daughter now has her own computer, and a connection to my wireless network.

My immediate thoughts went to shielding here from the, er, dark side of the internet so it was time to improve my router.

I’ve been running an IPCop box for over a year now, and I have nothing but praise for it. I knew it had Squid built-in, but I’d never played with it. My first port of call was to enable both the proxy and transparent proxying so that it could not be circumvented. This worked nicely, so it was onto the next step – filtering.

A quick google (and a chat with the #lugradio crew) pointed me at squidGuard which I promptly downloaded and installed. I few ticks in the right boxes, and all traffic to non-whitelisted sites is blocked excellent.

It took me a couple of attempts to get the filtering working the way I wanted. The trick was to add the “approved” sites to the whitelist, then remove all entries from the “Allowed” field. This forced all machines not listed in the “Privileged” or “Banned” fields to use the default ACL which blocks traffic. There’s no way to tell squidGuard (via IPCop) to block undefined traffic for entries in the “Allowed” field.

Sounds too good be true? It is. This was all acheived on my second attempt on a fresh machine – enabling Squid on my original machine did nothing, and when I enabled squidGuard the whole box ground to a halt (and when traffic did get through it wasn’t filtered) so I did a fresh install of IPCop on a slightly beefier machine and all was good.

Next up… getting QoS working so my VoIP traffic gets priority.

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