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Need Internet Filter & Reporting

Tags:
  • Filter
  • Business Computing
  • Office
  • Internet
Last response: in Business Computing
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June 4, 2014 5:03:58 PM

Hi all,

Does anyone have a solid web filter with reporting that you are using?

I have a small office with about 40 users and 15 PC's ( Fire department )

Currently we are running PearlSW. But at $650 per year, it starts to hurt the budget. As you can imagine as a public Fire Department we are working with limited funds and need to make every nickel count.

We are running off of one server (Win SBS 2003) which I will be upgrading to 2012 soon. I also have a Fortigate 40C as my firewall. So I really don't need anymore appliances.

Pearl Echo Suite is client based and reports back to our server for content updates and logging. I'm looking for something similar but of course cheaper.

Please keep the suggestions coming! It's great to have so many people help!

Tom

More about : internet filter reporting

June 4, 2014 5:11:26 PM

There are multiple free Linux based firewall appliances. pfSense, untangle, etc.

Put it on any old (cheap) box, and run with it.
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June 4, 2014 5:36:22 PM

I've been looking into pfSense and Untangle as well for a few different environments. This is a great option in some situations as yes it can be free. Just load it on an old computer, configure some settings, and you are ready to go. However, what I have found so far is that content filtering can be a real bear to get working RIGHT on these.

First, for pfSense, we found that while content filtering could be enabled for free, the services worked some of the time but not others, didn't block everything it should, and other times just completely crashed internet service entirely. This was a pretty thorough test environment we had set up and everything seemed to operate fine if we didn't have the content filtering enable, but as soon as it is on we started seeing problems. It wasn't an issue with throughput either as we only had two guest computers in our test network, an internet connection of 10 Mbps, and running on a dual-Xeon server with 8 GB of RAM.

Next, Untangled. Now I haven't gotten to play with this one much yet, but so far from everything I have read and looked at, the free version of the content filtering service in Untangled (lite) doesn't catch very much. However, they do have an annual subscription for a more robust content filtering service which sounds like a pretty nice one too. However, it does increase the demand for hardware so you might not be able to go with just a cheap old waste computer and get away with it efficienty.

What I have used for the places that needed this was the content filtering services which can be purchased as a subscription on the customer's Sonicwall firewall. It's worked quite well, but in the last three years of running it we have had two instances where someone did access inappropriate content that should have been blocked. It's not perfect, but it's also pretty cheap, efficient, and does the job pretty well. That being said, I don't know for sure what Fortigate has and if it is something similar that you can get subscription services with it since you already have that firewall in place.
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