Eva is rapidly growing up (2 years and 4 months) and it will not be long before she is surfing the web. She already asks for websites to be brought up, she loves the night garden website and asks ‘press the night garden button’ every time I am sat with the laptop.
Although I like the idea of NetNanny and similar products, they are all focused around one PC and controlling that one PC or one profile on that PC. As an IT professional I have a number of computers all over the house, A Media Centre, a laptop for both Cheryl and myself and a PC in my office. With the new kitchen extension we will have another LCD TV along with a media centre PC. So the access to computers in the house is rather open.
I want to control the network we have at home rather better anyway. Currently I allow the router to do all the work, it handles the DHCP and the control of the network. I would like to have more control over that and as such a Linux server to control the network would be ideal.
This being so I would then be able to use Squid proxy to filter content on the network, I could then install Dansguardian on top of Squid to filter our Adult content and provide me with more control.
The only problem with this is that I do not like the idea of a server type PC, this both because I do not like the idea of having it running constantly as that could become costly, but also the size and noise of such a machine does not lend its self to the home environment.
I have been looking at low power PC options and have found the Sheeva plug system which is an ARM based mini PC which is the size of a standard power supply.There are a few options but the one that I was looking at was the Sheeva Plug Multi which takes an SD card for the OS. You can optionally buy an SD with an OS pre-installed Debian 6 or Ubuntu 9. Or you can download the CD Card Images from their site.
Sheva Plug
This is ideal as I want to have a system running Ubuntu as my tests with Dansguardian in VirtualBox have all been with Ubuntu and the install went very easily.
The system has a 1.2Ghz ARM processor with 512Mb of Flash Ram and 512 Mb of DDR2 Memory.It has a Gigabit Ethernet port, USB2 port and ESATA type II port. It does not have a VGA or other monitor port, the idea behind this is that you would access it via SSH which suits me. It also has the ability for another SD card to be plugged in or the USB and ESATA ports give the opportunity to add storage to the device effectively giving you a NAS solution.
The power consumption at about 19w is a little higher than some ‘Low power PC’ options, but at £89 I do not think that you can argue that, especially for the size of the device and being able to hide it away in a draw or behind a desk somewhere without it causing trouble with noise.
My only concern about this is that once I setup this system, I will change all the browsers settings of all the PCs on the network so that they run through the Squid proxy rather than directly to the router. I need to figure out how to stop the router accepting traffic from anything else other than the Squid proxy server so that you can not simply take out the proxy settings.
I have a fairly advanced Billion router (I forget the model) but I ams sure that somewhere on its configuration this will be possible.
I will be placing an order for this device and I will post her how my trials go with setting it up as both a home network server and as a content filter or net nanny.
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2 comments
miloch says:
October 2, 2010 at 4:53 am (UTC 0)
Hi, i have read this interesting article about sheevaplug use. i agree with the idea of protecting our children from dark side of web. This is really something every parents giving children access to the Internet should think about before addiction.
There’s just a point i disagree in the concept : having to put the proxy adress in all browser is not safe as it’s possible for a “normal” user to easily change it.
because you have an esata sheevaplug, a better solution would be to use USB for adding a second Ethernet adapter. This way you could bring up a bridge between your internet box and eth0 of your sheevaplug, use your sheevaplug as router/netfilter firewall/DHCP, then add a rule to build a transparent proxy. Then you have a centralized security. that’s just what i would have done. have nice day
Digitalquill says:
October 2, 2010 at 11:49 am (UTC 0)
Great idea, thanks for the feedback.
What I have done is stop all address other than the sheeva plug proxy’s ip address from accessing the Internet via the router so even if users take out the proxy address they still can not access the Internet.