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Gordon Henderson wrote:
Yep, I guess so. I suppose really there needs to be a team of people clubbing together to setup something to offer support maybe, in which case there are a couple of people to offer support. But then there's the big guys (RM etc) to compete against then.On Tue, 19 Jan 2010, Rob Beard wrote:Quoting Rhia Knowles <rhiadratech@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:My comment: Severely restrictive, overzealous filtering, usually. If they want a open source filter, there is Dansguardian. or for afilter/firewall combo, what about Smoothwall. Im sure it could save them a ton of cash. All they need is a spare PC with a pair of network cards for Smoothwall. And its Linux based, of course, or I wouldnt be mentioning ithere.Of course, as a school they wouldnt be able to use Smoothwall Express (theFree version) but Smoothwall itself looks easier to set up anyway, for non-linux Geeks.As a school they could well be eligible for some sort of educational discount. Other than that there is always IPCop with SquidGuard.I was looking into SquidGuard recently and found a couple of scripts which could keep it updated with the latest filters, filters which are available free (as in beer) for personal non-commercial use.Don't sell it cheap to them. Not that I'd not like them to save money, there is the old corp-rat mentality that cheap isn't good.Problem is though getting someone to support it. I guess some schools just want to pay a flat fee and have done with it.That's easy - I already do that for the one school on my books, however I'm dealing purely with the administration side of things. They run a totally separate ADSL line for the teaching side, and I've really no idea what they use (if anything) for filtering. I suspect, knowing the school, they trust their kids to do the right thing.So what would be needed for a (primary) schools broadband is really a "black box" solution - sell them a good business quality broadband (or 2, separate for admin and teaching), and literally a black box appliance - diskelss router/filter that sits in-front on the LAN and does a little bit of cacheing and a lot of filtering. Actually could be clever and sell them an ADSL modem and Linux router combo... It's actually what I've got in the works for my PBXs, so it's not hard to do.Create yourself a monitoring back-end to look after all your sites, so you know it's down before they do, take feeds from all the filtered feed people you know of (e.g. cleanfeed if you can buy into it) and so on and push these out to the schools.But try to sell that to a school as a one-man-band and they'll laugh at you.Gordon
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html