Thus after much deliberation and investigation it was decided that Dansguardian was the way to go.

I initially installed the server version of feisty on an old laptop to give this a go.  It worked out OK, but the old laptop just didn’t have enough to keep things running smoothly for more than an hour. The lack of a GUI also made things a little more difficult when looking at the logs and stuff. (I was trapped in a 640×480 console environment and it just sucked).

So today I started over, again using the standard version of Ubuntu ‘Feisty edition’. If you’re using the server edition you can use this tutorial, which given it’s age has some pitfalls. Most notably you need to edit the firehol script to replace all instances of ‘%q’ with ‘%b’.

sudo gedit /lib/firehol/firehol (replace vi with you editor of choice) and replace all %q strings with %b.
This is documented in that thread somewhere toward page 7 I think.

After fumbling through that again, I figured there had to be a better way, and there is.

I opted for the Dansguardian/Web Content Filtering Only installer from the ‘Christian Edition’.

You still need to install ‘squid’ sudo apt-get squid

But after that it’s fairly painless. It also includes a pretty handy gui for tweaking the Dansguardian files.

The base network is set up like so:

Items of note:

• Not all computers are filtered, but anyone can be by using the proxy manually by configuring the browser to do so.
• Computers I WANT to be filtered are forced to do so by the following:
  • They have DHCP reservations for both their ethernet address and through the wireless to get an IP that I want them to have.
  • DHCP also give them bad DNS info.
  • They can access printers and what not on the local network.
  • Any traffic that tries to get outside from these addresses is dropped by an Access list in the router.
  • To surf, their browsers must be configured to use the proxy .99 on my network, else they go nowhere.
• Yes, this isn’t perfect
  • The easy end around on this is to change your IP, and hard-code it to a valid IP.
  • But my kids can’t do that (yet) and they aren’t admins on the machines that are forced to the proxy anyway.
• I’m sure there may be other ways around it that I haven’t thought of, but for now this is working well.

It’s not very often that you find exceptional customer service. In fact it’s nearly impossible today.

Being a call it as I see it person, I have no problem ripping a company on the blog if they deserve it. Which means when I come across someone, or some company that really went the extra mile we should give them their due.

A couple of weeks ago we bought a new dining room table. We purchased said table from World Market.

This table in fact: The Sourav Dining Table

We lucked into it on sale. No we didn’t really need a table, but that’s beside the point. We stuffed it in the Excursion and brought it home. Setup was painless, it’s just a HUGE table top and four legs.

The rustic/antique look goes perfect with our old farm house. The chairs we already owned matched it pretty well.

Fast forward about 2 weeks. We noticed a crack starting at one end of the table right in the middle. The top is basically 3 large boards and this crack was splitting the table right in the middle of one of the boards, not at a joint. When I first saw it I didn’t care that much, it added character. But my wife really didn’t like the fact that you could look through this crack and see the floor.

I immediately started dreading taking this 8 foot table apart, putting it in the Excursion, taking it to World Market and getting into a fight.

My wife called World Market, explained the situation and they said ‘No Problem’, we’ll take care of it.

What? Did I hear that right?

Yes, they ordered in another table, are delivering it (this is a 45 minute drive, not like it’s down the street) and picking up the old table. It took them a week to get the new table in, and we’re being flexible as to delivery. This time of year is busy for everyone.

So at the time of this writing, we don’t actually have a new table, but World Market is being very, very accommodating.

They will certainly get more of our business in the future.

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