DansGuardian For Linux

DansGuardian is an open source, completely free, cross-platform and award winning web content filtering tool that uses the powerful Squid proxy cache application to do all the fetching. It is the perfect solution for home networks where kids have direct access to the Internet.

Parents who want to protect their kids from bad websites, can easily install the DansGuardian software on a GNU/Linux operating system that acts as a server on their home network. Once configured, the software will block the websites you don’t want your kids to see.

The DansGuardian project filters the web using multiple methods, including URL and domain filtering, PICS filtering, content phrase filtering, MIME filtering, file extension filtering, as well as POST limiting.

Key features include state-of-the-art URL filtering system, an advanced phrase weighting system, support for filtering both HTML and text web pages for obscene (sexual, violent, racial, etc.) content, a powerful ad blocker, as well as support for blocking all IP based URLs.

DansGuardian installs on any distribution of GNU/Linux the same way any other open source software is installed, by compiling the sources. As an alternative, you can try to install DansGuardian from the main software repositories of your distro.

After installation, you can use DansGuardian from a command-line environment by running the ‘dansguardian’ command. Add the --help argument to the ‘dansguardian’ command to view the usage message and available command-line options.

Being a cross-platform software, DansGuardian can be installed on personal computers where a supported Linux kernel-based or BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) operating system exists. It is also known to work Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris OSes, supporting 32 and 64-bit flavors.