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[thegisguy]

My in laws own a small business. Their employees are abusing their internet access spending lots of time on sites like Ebay and Craigslist. They asked my opinion on a solution. I've looked a Net Nanny, and think it might work. However I thought I would ask people here their opinion. I know a gateway firewall like Smooth Wall would work, but I'm hoping for something client side that is VERY simple for them to administer themselves, since I live 700 miles away.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

This may work:

http://www.opendns.com/


Another option would be to block those sites from the router level.

 

[Sam25]

You can give this a read:

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=76&threadid=2066707

 

[Crusty]

The first thing you need to decide is whether or not you want a hardware or software solution.

If you go the hardware route Cisco, Watchguard, and Sonicwall.. they all have hardware appliances designed for small businesses to provide these kinds of features.

I'm not sure on the product line for Sonicwall, but for Cisco you'd look at an ASA 5505. Watchguard has the Edge series firewalls. There's an ongoing cost associated with these in order to keep up with the changes to the content filtering, but once it's setup I don't see any reason why it would require much work at all. They can all be setup for total remote management as well. You can hook a 56k modem up to the serial consoles to provide management in case their ISP goes down.

I don't know much about the software side, so I'll leave that up to other people. Either way, a hardware or software solution should fit your needs.

 

[compman25]

Originally posted by: Crusty
The first thing you need to decide is whether or not you want a hardware or software solution.

If you go the hardware route Cisco, Watchguard, and Sonicwall.. they all have hardware appliances designed for small businesses to provide these kinds of features.

I'm not sure on the product line for Sonicwall, but for Cisco you'd look at an ASA 5505. Watchguard has the Edge series firewalls. There's an ongoing cost associated with these in order to keep up with the changes to the content filtering, but once it's setup I don't see any reason why it would require much work at all. They can all be setup for total remote management as well. You can hook a 56k modem up to the serial consoles to provide management in case their ISP goes down.

I don't know much about the software side, so I'll leave that up to other people. Either way, a hardware or software solution should fit your needs.

TZ180 or TZ190 for a small business if you want a Sonicwall.

 

[thegisguy]

Open DNS looks pretty promising. I think I'll have them test that out before I suggest a hardware solution.

Thanks.

 

[NesuD]

Originally posted by: compman25

Originally posted by: Crusty
The first thing you need to decide is whether or not you want a hardware or software solution.

If you go the hardware route Cisco, Watchguard, and Sonicwall.. they all have hardware appliances designed for small businesses to provide these kinds of features.

I'm not sure on the product line for Sonicwall, but for Cisco you'd look at an ASA 5505. Watchguard has the Edge series firewalls. There's an ongoing cost associated with these in order to keep up with the changes to the content filtering, but once it's setup I don't see any reason why it would require much work at all. They can all be setup for total remote management as well. You can hook a 56k modem up to the serial consoles to provide management in case their ISP goes down.

I don't know much about the software side, so I'll leave that up to other people. Either way, a hardware or software solution should fit your needs.

TZ180 or TZ190 for a small business if you want a Sonicwall.

Sounds like their business doesn't have a lot of computers. I'd say TZ180 or even 150 if there are 5 or less nodes. TZ 180 can handle up to 25 nodes reasonably well TZ 150 up to 10. Other things to consider are the gateway antivirus and spyware filtering. We use these in remote POS deployments and they have worked exceedingly well for us. Really should have someone experienced with the sonic OS set them up though. Joe computer user would probably be lost in that.

Some internet security packages have content filtering capabilities. Trend Micro Internet security has this under parental controls.