Hello Terence,
My name is Guyait, i'm a french system and network technician and I'm interesting by your soft Hostess. I wanted use Squidguard but I saw that your solution is easier and faster to install, and maybe as performant as squidguard (?) Moreover i don't need the management functionalities of squidguard.
So can you tell me if Hostess doesn't use too many resources ? Do you think i can install it directly on a Linux proxy, instead of squidguard, to prevent an entire network (10~15 hosts only) from access porn sites (and other like gambling, etc) ?
If you can help me it would be useful for me
Thank you very much
Hello.
As you probably know, the “hosts” file is what all modern operating systems' IP stacks use today to “redirect” names(a.com, b.com, c.com) to ip addresses(1.2.3.4, etc) and override what your DNS servers use. So by setting a list of hosts names to 127.0.0.1(the localhost ip address), we can manually override everything. Squidguard does this, but then it also does “regular expression”(or regexp) pattern matching, and what's called “whitelisting” - which means if you block http://site.com/, but want to allow http://site.com/research/, you would put the 'research' entry into a whitelist. A hosts file is limited to just redirecting(or blocking) hosts.
Squidguard(and other programs like it) use a “list of hosts”, while a hosts file use a “list of mappings”
So a squidguard list says
a.com b.com c.com
While a hosts file says
127.0.0.1 a.com 127.0.0.1 b.com 127.0.0.1 c.com
Personally I've never used squidguard myself, and I haven't run a proxy server myself… However, I do believe using a hosts file would be of great use for a proxy server to do blacklisting. As far as I know, using it on Linux shouldn't be a problem whatsoever. I would also suspect that the Linux folks would have some caching tricks to use to make search times fast as well.
The only performance issues I am aware of is that if you use it as a hosts file on Windows and forget to change the different settings(that are listed on the Hostess page), then Windows runs extremely slow.
Next thing I'll say is that I personally use separate host lists from this site for a computer lab I help run… http://urlblacklist.com/ - I think its great for blocking porn, though you'll never get *every* site that exists.
What I do for the lab I help run is have a bunch of host lists concatenated onto each other of porn, warez, and chat, then run hostess on it. It starts out as a four megabyte file and ends up about 8 megabyte after processing. It is my belief that if Windows can handle it with no problems(after the adjustments listed on the Hostess page), that Linux should be able to handle it without any problems at all.
Now if you're using Mozilla FireFox on all of those computers, you may be able to use the FireFox extension “AdBlock” and be able to use the “regexp” stuff, but I have had performance issues with using that with large lists. But again, that has nothing to do with hosts or Hostess.
I hope that answers your questions; if you have any more, let me know, I'll try to help.