Our local school’s routerboard decided to wait for the holidays to crash its disk and go down in all its glory. It was running CentOS 7 and Squid to act as a transparent proxy server. The setup was quite complex since it also managed HTTPS connections transparently, using a locally generated certificate and Squid’s SSL bump.
I haven’t managed yet to translate this to Rocky Linux 8 or 9, since the more recent Squid included with these distributions completely breaks the old syntax.
In the meantime I have to implement at least some basic form of parental control, since it’s a school and kids are not supposed to use the dark side of the Internet, at least not on the school’s Wi-Fi.
I vaguely heard about some special DNS servers that act as a crude form of filter. Anybody here has some hands-on experience with this ?
Years back I used squid with dansguardian for filtering. Probably easier now would just be to set up pihole - https://pi-hole.net/ which I believe can also act as a proxy as well as the DNS filtering.
That said, you can probably use pihole on Rocky anyway without needing to use a Raspberry PI.
It’s not so much for blocking ads. More like preventing them from watching porn or other adult-only content. As far as I understand, Pi-Hole is blocking ads and that’s it.
I’m pretty sure it blocks adult stuff too, gambling, violence, etc. I could be wrong though. Dansguardian did block all that providing you had the lists up-to-date. So was pretty sure pi-hole had something similar integrated.
I use opendns for parental/family controls.
It’s been a while since I set it up but I suspect it was the free family shield.
From memory you still have to register as a user.
Quad9.net is supposedly good free service for blocking things too, although I think this is more in the realms of potentially blocking bad downloads - spyware, etc. I’m currently using nextdns.io paid subscription which also allows me to block stuff. Either configured as the DNS on my firewall, or as profiles which can then be added to smart phones, etc. Has options to block certain categories like the OP wanted too.