Re: [squid-users] Websense with Squid

I second this opinion. The k-12 education market requires proxy content
filters to receive e-rate funding. Running websense on squid would make a
lot of sense for these schools.

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Simon White wrote:

> I think a commercial program like WebSense is shooting itself in the foot
> by not allowing me to integrate it with Open Source projects. I work in
> Africa and Open Source is a Good Thing here. Microsoft products are no
> cheaper in Africa, and as they close in with the BSA and start, in 2002,
> their war on piracy, then many businesses are going to be forced to think
> Open Source so that they can have a solid network without huge annual fees
> for upgrades and such.
>
> One thing that is an issue for us here is bandwidth cost, and thus web
> filters / spam filters / caches are an excellent way for us to acheive
> more with limited resources. I have checked, configured and in some cases
> installed Squid at African ISPs in Tunisia, Morocco and Malawi, and it was
> always present even on networks where commercial software had been part of
> the initial investment, Cobalt CacheRaqs and Qubes run an albeit less from
> perfect version of Squid which we have deployed in Educational projects.
> Whole schools run, if they have internet at all, at 64 or 128 kbps and
> then that's only those that are privately funded by fee paying students.
>
> The one thing that a commercial product like Websense can do is improve
> productivity. 128kbps pipes get saturated quickly if an efficient filter
> is not in place, and for all the great efforts of something like Squid
> Block, it is, as described on the web site:
>
> "some general catchall rules that filter out sites, and a second
> list of sites that would be blocked by this list, but are in reality
> legitimate web sites."
>
> which is a far cry from a human database which is updated on a regular
> basis. Lot of false positives can come out of general rules. You cannot
> expect the open source community, with all due respect, to come up with a
> full-on database of sites in competition with a commercial product which
> is clearly in a market with few competitors, and will win because its
> efficiency can save a company a lot more money in lower bandwidth, higher
> cost situations.
>
> So, I was hoping to include Websense in an integration with Squid and can
> even get packets to the Websense machine on whatever port it likes
> transparently, but I can't use it because they have developed a
> proprietary protocol, possibly aimed at forcing us all to buy specific
> hardware or commercial firewalls in order to keep the investment in the
> "club" including Microsoft, Cisco, Check Point, and Inktomi...
>
> Well anyway enough politics, thanks for the responses I have had. I will
> have to go install an old licence of Microsoft Proxy I have hanging around
> on the network to get packets back from Websense.
>
> --
> |-Simon White
> |-Internet Services Manager
> |-MTDS S.A.
> |-tel +212.3.767.4861
> |-fax +212.3.767.4863
> |-14, rue 16 novembre
> |-Rabat, Kingdom of Morocco
>
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Squid Support (Henrik Nordstrom) wrote:
>
> > Not a good progress.
> >
> > There are others who are more open on the subject.
> >
> > Regards
> > Henrik
> >
> >
> > On Tuesday 19 February 2002 09:48, Simon White wrote:
> > > Yes. Their official reply to me 12 months ago was "Squid
> > > integration by June 2001", now it's "No integration with Squid". I
> > > wrote them and told them to get up and support it, open up the WISP
> > > protocol, give it to some Squid hackers... have it integrated in no
> > > time at all.
> >
> >
>

-- 
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