[Pfilter-users] Re: pfilter

[Neil G. <ngo...@nc...>]

You could do content filtering of web accesses by doing
some fancy packet filtering, but it wouldn't work very well.
Packet filtering under 2.4 kernels now support matching
based on arbitrary string matches, but it would be kludgy
at best (Imagine having to drop all packets having to do
with barnyard or fairy tales that have "cock-a-doodle-doo"
because of the first 4 characters matching). It would also
be awkward to drop packets in the middle of a web
connection, the browser would just see a time-out.
I would suggest using either an annoying proxy, a plug-in
for windows computers, or turning on the ratings stuff
in internet explorer. Just remember that any kind of
filtering, will only work on a certain percentage of bad
sites (hard to interpret picture content), and will falsely
block some good sites. But that may be better than no
filtering, depending on what your audience and goals are.
Sorry I can't be more help.

At 09:00 PM 1/16/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>I'm kinda new to the whole iptables thing but I'm looking
>for a way to do content filtering on www pages on my
>firewall using ip masquerade.  I don't want an intrusive
>proxy server but I would like to filter content and block
>sites which have potentially offensive content.  This
>server will operate at a school.
>
>Is pfilter something which can help me implement this and
>if so how?