Dear all
I would like to set up a service which will automatically update the Squid proxy server's banned sites list. It would work using Concurrent Version System (CVS). Once a day, it would:
- Get the current version of the banned sites list and update Squid. - Add any new sites which the school has added to their version of the list to the current version. - Remove any sites which the school has taken off their version of the list from the current version.
It would probably be best to do this using the "redirect_program" option. Similar to squidguard. It should be possible to do this without needing to restart squid, which can take quite a time on a big cache. You can also do this more often than once a day. Maybe even as DNS style distributed database.
This would offer all those taking part in the service "herd immunity". For example, suppose http://www.some.provider.net/~someone/hotstuff/ pops up and goes round one school. The Squid administrator would add that site to the banned list to prevent it being accessed any more. The next day, every other Squid server using the service would know about it too.
I suggest this would be a great improvement on the existing clumsy filtering technologies which sometimes block access to acceptable sites (see: http://www.peacefire.org for story).
Blocking sites isn't the hard bit. The hard big is getting a "clean" list. Rather than one contaminated with all sorts of strange political adgendas. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763