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Just thought i'd share my response to a post on the circuit riders mailing list about a content filtering solution. Thought it would be worth sharing this info. here ya go:

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I've recently finished a network installation in a small youth centre here in Liverpool. After finishing the installation they are now asking me over internet content filtering software to prevent the young people from accessing porn. I am normal against such measures but that is what they want as they are afraid of being plastered on the front of the local paper and having the local authority withdraw their measly grant!

Just a bit of techy background. There are 15 win 2000 workstations, 8mb broadband, newly installed win 2003 SBS server (although i haven't installed or configure ISA or Exchange, just standard win 2003 installation). I am using DHCP to dish out the address of the router across the network. Ideally i would prefer some kind of server solution as it is a lot easier to install and run. I have come across surf control as the main product. What's the most popular content filtering solution in schools? They would prefer to go on a similar system as they are linked to local education authority.

Anyone any recommendations for any solutions? Any providers that provide cheap charity licences much appreciated.

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You might be interested in a product that integrates with ISA server. A
website which I've heard is quite respectable has a list of options at

http://www.isaserver.org/software/ISA/Content-Security/

There's also Squidguard http://squidguard.shalla.de/ but I believe you
will still probably want to seperately subscribe to an upto date list of
objectionable sites.

I believe that RM SafetyNet is likely to be the most popular solution in
schools. http://www.ifl.net/safetynet/

Draytek Vigor 2800/V/G ADSL router (£120 - £150 + VAT, depending on model) with 1 x Surfcontrol subscription at $47.88 per annum (circa £30 at current exchange rates)

This is all configurable via the web browser interface on the router.

We are using this at one community learning centre (for children with special needs) and are about to roll it out to another 17 centres in Berkshire. It costs less that 10% of our previous solution.

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I've used Dans Guardian [1] before and that's worked well, but had a bit of
fiddling to get it up and running. I used it as part of a Linux distro I
downloaded but for the life of me I can't remember what it was called.

For standalone computers Naomi Filter [2] is really quick and easy to setup
and use. I've also used it for larger network situations when time and money
hasn't let me install a server side solution.

Mat

[1] http://dansguardian.org/
[2] http://www.naomifilter.org/index.html

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We have found Smoothwalls products to be especially robust and
versatile, if the centre has a healthy budget. The new
(http://www.smoothwall.net/products/schoolguardian5/) is especially suited.

If budget is low/non-existent then Dansguardian (the software upon which
the commercial smoothwall is based) is quite easy to set up and use.

In both cases, you will need a computer with 2 network cards that sits
between the ADSL and the rest of the network or server. Smoothwall is an
OS in itself, and requires a good spec machine. DG will only require a
Pentium 2 with 256MB RAM and a 2GB HDD, we have used Fedora or Ubuntu
with success.

Both softwares use a combination of word weighting and white/blacklists
to determine what's allowed and what aint, very configurable.

One of the unexpected benefits of content filtering is that the
maintenance / virus-disturbance time on the client computers is
minimised, even click-manic kids find it difficult to infect a machine
when vbs, exe, bin and other potentially nasty and unnecessary file
extensions are blocked before they reach the computer.

If you encounter any problems doing the DG configuration, I can try to
help remotely.

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I have a few machines that filter the net, and they are based on ipcop.

http://ipcop.org it is very easy to setup, then add
http://www.advproxy.net/ and then add
http://www.urlfilter.net/

yes, it is linux, but the process is very easy and all the admin is done via a web control panel.
it will run on older hardware, have a look at the screenshots, install instructions are clear , the whole system is very easy to use.

I am just installing censornet for an aids support charity wanting to provide internet access for its users. (available from http://www.censornet.com/)

It is extremely fully featured and easy to install and configure. It doesn’t just block content but records all activity by users and more and provides a user friendly interface for the manager to see whats happening and control who can do what. The documentation is excellent and its all free. Blocked pages come with a link which allows users to request permission to access them. – useful in this case as users may need to access content that could unintentionally be blocked by many systems.

Censornet seem to make their pennies by charging £100 p.a. for the automatic update lists, but I believe lists can be downloaded from sites like dans guardian and manually entered if you know what you are doing.

As the initial download contains an up to date list containing the latest dodgy sites anyway, we felt the automatic updates probably will be unnecessary because once users find that access to content is being monitored, only the most determined users will go on to try and find sites that are not blocked, and these transgressions would be picked up in the logs and could be blocked from further access via the management controlled blacklists.