Getting Internet installed at your church can bring up allot of questions such as security, safety, bad content, ect. I know when we first looked at getting Internet one of the first things we wanted to tackle was filtering. There is just to much stuff on the Internet that is not appropriate for a church atmosphere, especially when you want to set up machines for church member access and youth to use. Along with coming up with a good solid solution to content filtering comes other concerns. There are many server and content filtering solutions out there, but most of them cost allot of money to purchase, deploy and maintain. Many times the upgrade path is what gets you, recurring costs of yearly subscriptions ect. This is just a short post explaining how we tackled the task of creating a safe Internet environment for our church .
We wanted to supply safe Internet access to many parts of our church. Internet access to our media presentation pc for quick access to media. A public access pc for church members to use in the library. Internet to our youth building for our youth to use. And other various computers like the parsonage, the sound booth. So filtering was a must for the usage we would be getting.
We started with a Mandriva Linux 2008.1 Server. Mandriva is a very nice, advanced Linux distribution that comes in a commercial and a free version, and has been a leader in the Linux community for many years. The free version doesn’t come with some of the things the commercial version has, but all can be easily added using the software installer. This version can be freely downloaded from their site.
Then using Squid and DansGuardian, we set up the actual content filtering. DansGuardian is an advanced, free content filtering system that has many options and configuration settings that make it highly configurable for any level of filtering. It filters using multiple methods. These methods include URL and domain filtering, content phrase filtering, PICS filtering, MIME filtering, file extension filtering, POST limiting. The content phrase filtering will check for pages that contain profanities and phrases often associated with pornography and other undesirable content. This was all done quite easily after installing the Mandriva server tools, and Webmin. Webmin is by far the best tool for managing things like DansGuardian. And a great place to get the URL filter lists is from http://urlblacklist.com/. They have a huge list that easily dumps into dansguardian.
So our filtering ended up being a completely free, solid open-source solution.
And it works great, we tested it quite a bit after the installation and it was absolutly impressive how well it filters. Bad content, ads, known infected sites. Getting intenet has been a great addition to our church, expecially knowing its safe and clean for everyone to use.