Last Updated on August 5, 2018
DansGuardian filters the content of pages based on many methods including phrase matching, Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) filtering and URL filtering. It does not purely filter based on a banned list of sites.
This software provides real-time virus scanning capabilities for content access.
DansGuardian is designed to be completely flexible and allows you to tailor the filtering to your exact needs. It can be as draconian or as unobstructive as you want. The default settings are geared towards what a primary school might want but DansGuardian puts you in control of what you want to block.
DansGuardian requires squid or another similar caching proxy server on your local network. It is award winning software.
Features include:
- Significantly cheaper than IGear (one of the best commercial filters)
- Block adverts by the use of an advert URL block list
- Flter text and HTML pages for obscene (sexual, racial, violent, etc) content
- Uses an advanced phrase weighting system to reduce over or under blocking
- Filter sites using the PICS labeling system
- Filter according to MIME type and file extension
- Filter according to URLs including Regular Expression URLs
- URL filtering is compatible with squidGuard black lists
- The URL filtering is able to filter https requests
- Can work in a ‘whitelist’ mode where all sites except those listed are blocked
- Can block all IP based URLs
- Is able to block sites when users try using the IP address of the site instead
- Produces a log in a very human readable format
- Optionally produces a log in CSV format for easy import into databases etc
- Able to log the username using either Ident or basic proxy authentication
- Ability to switch off filtering for specified sites, parts of sites, browser IPs and usernames
- Bock specified source IPs and usernames
- Block or limit web uploading (e.g. attachments in Hotmail)
- Work in a stealth mode where it logs sites that would have been blocked, but does not block them. This allows you to monitor your users without them knowing
- Uses a very intelligent algorithm to match phrases in web pages mixed in with HTML code and white space
- Big5, Unicode and top-bit set characters can be used in search phrases
- URL filtering is significantly faster than squidGuard
- The configuration lists use the same incredibly fast code that allows them all to be hundreds of thousands of entries long
- Can be made to re-read config files with a HUP signal
- Works perfectly in conjunction with Squid and Oops
- Has no 3rd party library requirements (no nb++ as was used in version 1) so can be installed much easier and so is also provided as an RPM
- Supports (adds) the squid X-Forwarded-For header line
- Supports compressed (Content-Encoding gzip and deflate) HTML
- Can be made to only listen on 1 IP
DansGuardian is no longer maintained. Its successor is named “e2guardian”.
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