[ILUG] Re: Dan's Guardian licensing

[Francis Daly]

On 27/01/2008, Ivan Griffin <ivan.griffin at ul.ie> wrote:
> Licensing issues notwithstanding, has anyone tried SquidGuard?
>
> How does it compare to Dan's Guardian?

squidGuard is a url filter.

Dan's Guardian is a content filter (which includes a url-filtering component).

Different beasts, especially when it comes to urls which are not in
the already-known list.

I use squidGuard to limit ads and other annoyances, and it works fine
for me. The regex part of the url filter seems to catch enough of the
not-already-known urls to keep me happy.

By their natures, DG must be more heavyweight, and also more likely to
block more things that you want to have blocked.

You can always run them both in series, and see which content gets
through the first one and is caught by the second. That's probably
only useful if sG gets first bite, as it would show you what extra is
blocked in your environment by using DG over sG.

> I've run Dan's Guardian successfully (somewhat) on an NSLU2 and it has
> worked well.  I'm assuming both DG and SG use the same blacklist file
> formats etc?

For the url-filtering part, yes. Or at least, http://urlblacklist.com/
claims their source is compatible with both.

> One feature I need is the ability to allow a teenager a daily quota of
> net time, so this is something I hacked into my copy of DG.

I've no idea how easy that would be to add to to squid or squidGuard.
You can trivially have "only between 9pm and midnight" rules, if
that's likely to be enough.

I'm guessing that just telling the teenager "no more than an hour a
day, please" is unlikley to be an acceptable strategy.

Good luck,

	f