Thursday, January 1, 2009

Web Content Filtering at Home

Fortinet makes an excellent integrated security appliance. They're on my "highly recommended" list. I've used a Fortigate 60 at home, in part because of it's excellent web content filtering capabilities (parental controls). However, the approx. $250/year for service and support has gotten hard to justify.

OpenDNS A free alternative is OpenDNS. I've been using it for months now, and it's done an excellent job, especially for the price. The domain name system (DNS) can be a little complicated for a basic Internet user, but OpenDNS provides relatively simple instructions on how to get started. They also have a nice administration console on their web site for managing your filter settings (which categories to block, etc.) and for reviewing performance stats. Furthermore, if you limit DNS traffic (port 53) on your network to the OpenDNS servers, then you can remove the possibility of side-stepping the content filters just by changing your DNS server settings on your computer.

I'm using my old Linksys WRT54GS 1.1 firewall/router/wireless access point, and I couldn't find a way to manage DNS traffic this way with the factory firmware. However, since the firmware is Linux-based, there are some excellent 3rd-party firmwares with more capabilities. After a little research, I chose the Tomato firmware and installed it without a hitch. It's a definite improvement over the factory firmware, and even includes some nice historical bandwidth utilization charts. It was also simple to configure the DNS traffic controls. Highly recommended!