This maybe a stupid remark but doesn't astaro use a squid proxy server and doesn't squid offer a similar surf protection system. I used to condif squid with blacklists.txt en whitelists.txt and that worked fine.
Astaro is a commercial product. They are nice enough to offer us a free version to use. But I do not know of any commercial product that offers free surf protection and updates to the categories for free.
It takes time to update surf protection data, and time costs money. Based on my experience with many different firewall products, I do not think Astaro is out of line asking to be paid for the Cobion filtering.
The problem is that you need a reliable service provider who is able to maintain the URL lists and to follow up all the "site movements" of the internet.
It wouldn't be a problem to work with selfmaintained lists in a private environment but not if you depend on daily up-to-dateness.
Cobion scans the internet permanently using a huge amount of CPU's, has several methods to categorize URL's - no Open Source project has that manpower and technology to realize such an excellent service.
Open Source is very powerful and we like it very much but in some critical areas we still depend on commercial products.
What about SquidGuard and squidGuard blacklist? I used them on Slackware + squid + squidGuard and it was very good. http://www.squidguard.org/blacklist/ http://ftp.teledanmark.no/pub/www/proxy/squidGuard/contrib/ Now I have no more time to make all by myself; sò I started using ASL. But I think that is not right that I have to buy Surf Protection package (for commercial version) to make my own blacklist and whitelist, since I will not use Copion blacklist database...
I tend to agree...i currently use Dansguardian with a free blacklist, which is updated frequently..of course dansguardian also does text content scanning and not just site blocking...does Cobion do that? Do you think it would be possible to install dansguardian on an ASL box?
I have used ASL at home for a few years and really like it. So when it came time to upgrade my church I thought that this would be a great idea for the church. Not having the ability to make use of SquidGard has been a major thorn in my side. In order to even consider using the built in surf protection it is going to cost most than what we paid for the firewall itself.
Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how SquidGuard could be added to an existing ASL box?
