WebFiltering:SquidGuardVsDansGuardian

From K12LTSP Wiki

Contents 1 Pros of squidGuard 2 Cons of squidGuard 3 Pros of Dan's Guardian 4 Cons of Dan's Guardian 5 Recomendations

Pros of squidGuard

• It is fast, the [[|http://www.squidguard.org/intro/ squidGuard web site]] claims that a Pentium 500 can analyze 100,000 queries in about 10 seconds.
• It is reliable
• It is simple, once it is enabled in K12LTSP, it will sync itself every night to [[|http://squidguard.mesd.k12.or.us MESD's blacklists]]

Cons of squidGuard

• It only filters based on domains/urls, it is reactive rather than proactive.

Pros of Dan's Guardian

• It filters the actual content of pages based on many methods including phrase matching, PICS filtering and URL filtering
• It can use the same blacklists as squidGuard, as such it can block at least as many sites as squidGuard

Cons of Dan's Guardian

• It is much more resource intensive than squidGuard
• It is more complicated to tune, as such it is more likely to generate false-positives

Recomendations

There are three factors to consider:

1. Are you willing to block good sites to make sure that as many bad sites as possible are blocked?

     If you are filtering for an elementry school and it is much more important to block bad sites than it is to make sure the kids can get to good sites, Dan's Guardian would be ideal.

     If you are filtering for a high school where students have a legitimate need to get to sites containing information on subjects such as sexually transmitted diseases or birth control, you will probably find that squidGuard blocks fewer such sites.

1. How much effort are you willing to put into it?

     squidGuard, as shipped with K12LTSP, will automatically keep itself updated. If you are happy with the results, there is no additional work required.

     Dan's Guardian, if you are concerned about false-positives, can take a fair amout of work to tune. Once it has been tuned, however, it will be about as hands-off as squidGuard.

1. How many concurrent users do you have?

     If you are running a filter for a large number of concurrent users, squidGuard is faster. Dan's Guardian can work as well, but it will require more hardware than squidGuard will.