Is there any way to set up a malware-blocking transparent proxy on an Airport Extreme?

Question

I'd like to add some kind of easily-administered transparent HTTP proxy to my home network. Ideally, it would allow me to, for example, redirect web requests to blacklisted servers into nothing, block certain kinds of content, et al.

My home network at the moment consists of a mac mini media server that could -- if the load wasn't huge -- fill this role as well, an Airport Extreme, and a mac laptop that is my main machine.

I'm reasonably technically savvy, so don't spare the complicated answers.

Answer 1

It might be easier to block bad things at the DNS level. With any router, if all your machines are set to acquire their DNS servers from the router, and the router is set to use a smart DNS service, such as OpenDNS, then users will be blocked from anything the service identifies as bad.

This kind of assumes that your users aren't actively trying to circumvent this, or that they aren't technically up to changing their DNS server. (like kids)

Even the free version of OpenDNS will allow you to whitelist/blacklist certain domains.

So, all you'd have to change in your Airport extreme is the DNS servers.