Web filtering for the home

Boscoh

Senior member
Jan 23, 2002
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My friend has recently asked me to network his home for him. He gave me an unlimited budget to work with (really, really, really big kid-in-a-candy-store grin), but of course I still want to give him the most for his money.

Part of what he wants is a web filtering solution for his kids. He doesnt want a solution that resides on each individual PC. For one thing, he's got 4 kids, so that would be sort of a pain to manage. Plus his kids are getting good with computers, especially his son, and he is worried about them being able to disable it. He would really like more of a network-proxy solution. I've done this a lot for businesses, so I'm familiar with offerings like Websense, N2H2, SmartFilter, SurfControl, etc. I wanted to see if anyone here would recommend something a little cheaper than the above...say less than $1000.

It must meet the following criteria:
1) Be easy for him to get into and change permissions, view logs, etc. He's not a computer genius.
2) It can run on it's own server, on an appliance, or on an ISA/Linux gateway if need be.

The following products are ones that I'm currently looking into:

TrendMicro Interscan VirusWall, SMB Edition

SnapGear's builtin Content Filtering Solution

CyberSitter for Businesses (Proxy solution)

Censornet

I've looked at Squid, but it looks like it's got a fairly indepth scripting language. Is that wrong?


Does anyone have any recommendations?
 

Diaonic

Senior member
May 3, 2002
305
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Sonicwall is a nice CFS solution, you can buy content filter subscribtions by the year an they update the filter for you automatically.

You said 4 users? You can pickup a 10 user sonicwall for about $500, very easy to configure, has a web interface. You can set it up with https so he can changed settings when hes not at home ect...

let me know if you have any questions, i use this is a business enviroment.

Sonic direct

Sonic wall