The Story (you can skip this if you like)
So my girlfriend got a job as pedagog at a small boarding home (around 40 kids, age 10 to 18), 3 weeks ago. I went there once and surfed the web from a shared pc and noticed they were used for everything but educational purposes and full of ad-ware (from xxx dailers to smilies add-ons), p2p-clients (you name it) , and lots of illegal content which might get the institution in trouble.
My first Question was: Who is responsible for this PCs? The sad Answer: Nobody, some of the Kids helped set install them about 4 years ago.
My girlfriend told here boss, which asked how she found out about this, which led them to me, which brings me to this question.
just for background this is in Eastern Europe
The Problem
- Abuse of the network
- Illegal materials downloaded
- Network conjustions
Hardware Architecture
- 6 Shared PCs with Win 2k
- 1 Office PC with Win XP - only one with printer
- 1 Huawei DSLModem/WLAN-Router
- 10 to 15 Notebooks connecting via WLAN
- 1 iPhone and 2 Nokia Phones (as listed on the DHCP client list)
Budget
0 , but there's an old PC , I think PIII 256mb Ram , currently with Windows ME (haven't seen that for a while); which no one is using. Time: I've got about 4 to 5 hours each weekend I could volunteer there.
Current Status
- Cleaned and Locked down the shared PCs
- setted OpenDNS with category filtering as DNS in the router, they could be figuring out how to use GoogleDNS on their notebooks every moment now
- changed all password
- Enabled Guest account on the Office PC, and instructed the personnel to keep it locked as long as they are out of the office. Kids (should they need to print something) can use the Guest account
The Final Words
I already received a astonishing number of hate-mails throw that contact SysAdmin-Form on the OpenDNS BlockedDomain page. I know this belongs more into a forum, but here are the most skilled people , and maybe someone is in a similar situation. If you consider this should be removed from SF, please refer me to a good forum
What are my free and efficient filtering options?
Thank for reading.
p.s. bonus question Kids come and ask my Girlfriend why they can't download torrents using there laptop, and they won't understand that they download illegal material, their argument "nobody around here ever got a fine". Now I want to make a poster explaining why their actions are a problem for the institution and why we are fighting them. Not that they would even read it, but at least I will try.
In the end I found Untangle to be a working solution, but the situation changed an I'm no longer responsible for this.
