Yesterday I wrote about securing your network. While I know that it is by no means a complete discussion on firewalls, let’s move on to talk in a little more detail about content filtering.

Our church has the highest grade of “business class” cable Internet available. It meets and even exceeds our needs for normal Internet browsing, giving each user sufficient speed for most uses. Unfortunately, they offer no sort of content filtering on the ISP side. Translation: all pages are by default accessible to all users, even “those” sites.

Well, it takes no Einstein to realize that this isn’t a good idea for a church. In fact, it’s a downright bad idea, specifically since we offer free WiFi to anyone who requests the passkey and have a computer lab for the little kiddos.

So, what options are available for content filtration?

1. Well, we could pay for client-side software for each machine. Ummm, no.
2. We could switch to an ISP with content filtering built in. That’d be a great option except for the fact that we don’t have a high-speed filtered provider in our area.
3. We could buy/lease a network filter like Barracuda or iPrism. These are very expensive, but they are GREAT for large organizations. Ours isn’t that big.
4. So, we chose Linux. It’s free, it’s fast, it’s efficient, and did I mention free?

We’re using DansGuardian as our content filter. The open-source DansGuardian is free for all non-commercial users. The creator also has a commercial version available through the fine folks at SmoothWall, known as SmoothGuardian.

DansGuardian works well with a huge blacklist of blocked sites, but it doesn’t rely on it. In fact, you don’t even *have* to have a blacklist. See, Dans also reads the HTML of each page you view scanning for banned phrases, URLs, PICS ratings, and more. If it sees a dirty word on a page, it blocks it, whether or not it exists in a blacklist. You can see the benefits of this straight away. Thousands of pornographic and otherwise obscene pages are created daily, and no blacklist could ever hope to keep up with them.

If you haven’t already, install a content filter in your church - it may save someone from developing a horrible addiction. (By the way, parents can also use DansGuardian at home)