I have an education client that I have been doing work for off and on. They called me before Christmas break and said they need a new content filtering system for just one of their computer labs (strange request, but ok). They said they want something that is either free or open source that they would just pay me to install/ set up. What do you guys think?
you could do something like piHole or pfblocker but the free feeds are not great in the grand scheme of things as Tom has mentioned.
2 Likes
I use pfBlocker, and it works great for me. I use the EasyList feeds, plus some external feeds from PiHole and Steven Black’s Unified Hosts, and some GeoIP blocking.
The setup is explained in this video:
Of course using a paid service will likely provide more up to date lists, but in my experience, the setup in that video has been sufficient to filter the lion’s share of undesireable content.
2 Likes
When using either of the tools mentioned above you will also want to block access to other DNS servers to those computers in your firewall. DNS based blocking won’t have an effect if a user is smart enough to change the DNS servers the computer uses.
1 Like
Or forward all dns traffic to your dns server regardless of what server they changed to.
example of how to forward all traffic to your server
1 Like
I’d also suggest a Pi-Hole. I love that thing and have one at home, one at work and one in the cloud for when I’m mobile, paired with OpenVPN.
1 Like
Thank you everyone! I think I will do pfSense with pfblocker. I will most likely also make all DNS go through the school’s managed DNS server.
1 Like
Do keep in mind that in order to make pfblocker work pfsense has to do the resolution for the lab but you can have pfsense forward queries to the managed dns sever.
Yup. That was the plan. Thank you for everything!
1 Like
i am trying to configure HAProxy to redirect to multiple application on the same host, e.g. emby, sabnzb, plex etc, so this subject coverage would be appreciated !