RE: [squid-users] Can this be done ?

This is as much a social engineering question as a technological one. Are
your users apt to violate an acceptable use policy? What are the
consequences if they do? In other words, how big does the big brother
need to be. Think also about how much time you want to invest in this, and
the animosity of your users.

Commercial and opensource blacklists can both be a waste of time and money
if a user can get to a single open proxy or http tunnel. This is made
doubly hard since the major web search engines cache content. The only
sure way out is to have a closed system: a large whitelist of known good
sites, but not many are willing/able to go this route (commercial systems,
mentioned essentially do this.) Otherwise, you will need to aggressively
block open proxies. See below. Check out dansguardian too, for even more
context based filtering that also uses website rating systems.

What can help:

Using data from the open directory project www.dmoz.org, and a pretty
simple perl script, you can jump start black/whitelists. There are freely
available scripts to do this. I've used one that was intended to migrate
data from dmoz to Mysql. Search mysql rdf dmoz. Some creative
awk/sed/grep/perl depending on your idiom, and in hours you can have a
black/white list that numbers in the millions.

Will it rival a commericial product? I'm not sure. But it will give you
more control. Which is a mixed blessing.
Received on Wed Jan 25 2006 - 08:52:10 MST