Unfortunately we have little time. openSIS will be rolled out this week with Moodle. I just want to block access to websites like Facebook and site hogging our bandwidth.
Urkosays
For that, at our school, we have a combination of:
– Squid proxy: on Ubuntu 8.04, squid 2.7, using Delay Pools. We don’t block websites, we just make them bloody slow. Plus with the caching we get a nice 20% additional efficiency. And nice daily reports on the usage. We then can talk and educate users, as it is also possible to hog bandwidth with “approved” sites.
– Firewall: allows external HTTP/HTTPS access only to the Squid proxy.
Urko says
Mmmm…
Why not go with Untangle?
Or any of these other options?
http://alternativeto.net/desktop/untangle/
Unless, of course, one of the goals is learning OpenBSD.
SaigonNezumi (Kevin) says
Will look into it now.
Urko says
Tony runs Untangle in his company, by the way. He can probably tell you more.
SaigonNezumi (Kevin) says
Looks easier than playing with OpenBSD :-). Thanks.
Urko says
Well, playing with OpenBSD could be fun in its own right! 🙂
Anyway, if you want a BSD based firewall, pfSense is probably a very good option.
You really have quite a few options before you get down and dirty to roll your own…
Another option that should be extremely solid is Vyatta Core, which actually and officially aims to compete with Cisco products.
Really, plenty of nice friendly options around… 🙂
SaigonNezumi (Kevin) says
Unfortunately we have little time. openSIS will be rolled out this week with Moodle. I just want to block access to websites like Facebook and site hogging our bandwidth.
Urko says
For that, at our school, we have a combination of:
– Squid proxy: on Ubuntu 8.04, squid 2.7, using Delay Pools. We don’t block websites, we just make them bloody slow. Plus with the caching we get a nice 20% additional efficiency. And nice daily reports on the usage. We then can talk and educate users, as it is also possible to hog bandwidth with “approved” sites.
– Firewall: allows external HTTP/HTTPS access only to the Squid proxy.
SaigonNezumi (Kevin) says
Wow, daily reports. Good idea but I wish I had the time. 🙁
Urko says
Squid + SARC, both in the Ubuntu repositories.
Very quick to set up. Tweaking can come later…