Take Me To Post Comment Form Okay, so I decided to put a few more servers on our local home network this week. Not necessarily a "newbies" project, but it's a good one. After all, who doesn't like a smoother browsing experience while still protecting the kids and one's own eyes?

After trying various configurations I finally came to one last night that is working well on our older hardware.

For one we have the dnsmasq DNS server. Now every internet connection has a DNS server it uses because it is required to translate URL's that humans read, such as www.coastalcourier.com, into something the web browser can understand; 69.64.79.188.

The difference is that instead of having one half way across the internet, we now have one inside our home. This makes connecting to repeated sites a lot quicker!

Once connected to the site, the proxy server now takes over. After you have visited a web site the first time, squid-proxy stores a copy of it on a local machine. This means that the next time you visit that page, instead of having to re-download the entire site from scratch, it just quickly compares to two and only downloads the data that needs updating.

It makes for faster web surfing and reduces the load on your Internet Service Provider. Especially useful with larger organizations, but also useful for smaller set ups; even homes.

Now while it does all the above, the web filtering kicks in. Yes, every library, school and large organization has this, or should, but do they filter viruses on every incoming page? Well, neither does mine, but only because I disabled it.

On my older machine it was slowing down after a bit and since I'm using Linux I really do not need to worry about viruses so much anyway. So I decided to disable that wonderful feature. When I get a better system, I will be sure to re-enable it just in case. ;-)

However, having kids in the home I need something to at least filter the crap out there and then keep a log of any "funny" attempts; dansguardian with ClamAV does an excellent job of it.

So there you have it. And while many other's probably have spent a good deal of time and money doing the above, I proudly did not have to. All thanks to Linux and the open source community.

Take care.

Edit: P.S. Something I forgot to mention in the original post was that I also use Firefox web browser with the Fasterfox Extension to help load the initial pages quicker before the squid gets a hold of it.

Note, though, that I only set it to "Optimized" and not "Turbo Charged" so that it doesn't cause a bigger strain on external servers, including my own proxy set up above.

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You can find out more about GNU/Linux at
http://www.hinesvilleonline.net and
http://www.getgnulinux.org/.

Software used in this post


dnsmasq
squid-proxy
dansguardian
ClamAV
Firefox web browser
Fasterfox Extension