The WebContentControl GUI takes control of (and helps you configure) DansGuardian, FireHol, and TinyProxy to create a very powerful system for controlling access to web sites. Let’s take a look at how this tool is installed and used.

Features

• Automatic configuration of Dansguardian, Tinyproxy, Firehol at installation.
• GUI to start/stop the filtering and configure all control tools (Dansguardian, Tinyproxy, Firehol).
• Instead of overwriting or replacing config files, it will change what’s necessary.
• Config files are backed up during installation and restored during uninstallation.
• SSL filtering.

Installation

I am going to show you how this tool is installed in Ubuntu. You won’t find this in the standard repositories, so the installation isn’t as simple as many installations. Here are the steps for installation:

Open a terminal window.

Issue the command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webcontentcontrol/webcontentcontrol
Issue the command sudo apt-get update
Issue the command sudo apt-get install webcontentcontrol

Figure 1

The installation might take longer than you would expect, as it is also configuring the necessary proxy software. Once WebcontentControl is installed, you can start the application with the command sudo webcontentcontrol. When the main window opens (see Figure 1), you might, at first, be a bit overwhelmed with what looks like more than your average content control system. Fear not, we will make sense of this tool.

Usage

Along the top of the window are three large buttons. Each of these buttons turns on or off either Firehol, TinyProx, and/or Dansguardian. If the button say On that means that service is on. If one of those is off, and you want it on, just click the button to turn it on.

In the Filter Settings tab you can control the preset configurations for DansGuardian, set the policies (from a simple AdBlocker policy to a Strict policy), access the DansGuardian configuration file directly, Set the naughtyness limit for DansGuardian, configure your blacklists/blocked IPs/banned sites/banned URLs/etc, and much more.

Let’s take a look at configuring a banned site with WebContentControl. Follow these steps:

1. Open up WebContentControl.
2. Click on the Filter Settings tab.
3. Click on the Banned Sites button.
4. When Gedit (or your default text editor) opens scroll down to the section titled “#List other sites to block:”.
5. Enter the sites you want to block.
6. Save the file.
7. Close Gedit.
8. Click the Save button.

Once you’ve done this you will need to set up your web browser to use the proxy IP address and port you have configured (by default the port will be 3129). When you try to open a blocked site, if you get an error that TinyProxy is not letting you through, or the browser is actually able to hit the blocked web site, make sure TinyProxy is running. Issue the command sudo /etc/init.d/tinyproxy start. When TinyProxy is running, try to hit the site again and you should see an Access is Banned error. Your web content is now being monitored and filtered.

And don’t get my reason for using DansGuardian stop you from thinking this server could be used in other deployments. DansGuardian could be used for schools, businesses, internet cafes, etc. With that in mind let’s see just how easy this is to get running.

I installed DansGuardian on a Ubuntu Server 8.10 installation. The installation took me all of approximately 2 minutes. The complexity of the configuration of DansGuardian will depend completely on how much you need to ban.

Installation

The first thing to do is get to the command line of your server and issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install dansguardian

The above command will install the filtering system. But you’re not finished because DG requrires another tool, tinyproxy, to act as a proxy server. To install tinyproxy issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install tinyproxy

Now you’re ready to configure.

Configuration

You could start up both DansGuardian and tinyproxy now and set up your browsers to use the proxy server right now. But you might want to take a visit to a couple of .conf files as well as the banned lists for DansGuardian. You will find the configuration file for DansGuardian in /etc/dansguardian. Open this up and take a look around. The most important configuration of this file is to make sure all the ports match up. In my installation both DansGuardian and tinyproxy were set up for port 8080. Perfect.

If you have a specific need for your network, make sure you go through both configuration files, which are set up very clearly and are well commented.

The next step is to take a look at the /etc/dansguardian/lists directory. In this directory you will find nearly every type of banned list you will need. The three most popular lists are:

• bannedsitelist
• bannedurllist
• bannedphraselist

The difference between bannedurl and bannedsite is with bannedurl you are able to ban only part of a site and with banndsite you can ban an entire site. The banned lists are set up very clearly. For instance, if you want to ban a site you would see this in the bannedsitelist:

# List categorisation
#listcategory: "Banned Sites"
#List other sites to block:
badboys.com

You can list any IP you want in this section. The bannedphraselist configuration looks like this:

# To block any page with words that contain the string "sex". (ie. sexual)
# <sex>

You would uncomment out the second line from the above. Again, this configuration file is commented very well so it will be easy to set up.

Starting the Services

First start up tiny proxy with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/tinyproxy start

Now start DansGuardian with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/dansguardian start

Configuring your browsers

This is very simple. What you need to do is configure all the browsers you want to go through the content filter to use the IP address of the DansGuardian server as their proxy server.

Final Thoughts

If you have ever wanted to use a content filtering server but didn’t want to have to spend hours setting one up, DansGuardian is your solution. Not only is this solution simple, it is reliable and easy to maintain.