[Server-devel] What's cooking in the XS pot this week (2008-10--01)

[Bryan Berry]

On Fri, 2008-10-03 at 18:33 +1300, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan.berry at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> How happy are you with DanGuardian? Is it a useful filter?
> >
> > We use it internally w/in our office and we are happy w/ it. We use it
> > locally to "eat our own dog food." By default it blocks a lot if not
> > most content on the Internet, including stuff that doesn't seem
> > objectionable at all.
> 
> Yeah, that's one of my concerns. I looked a little bit at DG
> documentation a few days ago, as I was fighting with Squid's memory
> usage, to understand how resource intensive it is, and how it works.
> And in the back of my mind the question was - is this the right tool?

We did a cursory check and it looked like Dansguardian is the best tool
out there. The key to dansguardian is that you can get up-to-date filter
lists.

Dans can use a good bit of memory but I haven't really calculated how
much. Top shows me a lot dansguardian processes, each using about 10K of
RES memory, 980 of SHR, and 0.5% of Mem. What I understand about top and
memory is that it doesn't really tell much at all b/c the processes are
using shared memory.

to date we haven't had any issue running 2 schools and our office thru
one server running dansguardian and Squid. Yes, I know this is not an
ideal solution. We don't have dans and Squid running on the School's
XS's currently, but we intend to in November.


> When you mention it blocks most content, I'm less than thrilled. A
> filter that is too blunt will actually backfire -- will be too easy to
> false-match and also easy to workaround. Users will learn something
> but perhaps not what we want. A smarter filter, one that does not give
> all/most users an incentive to find workarounds, is a much healthier
> solution. But I'll get deep into it later, more likely in the 0.6
> cycle.
> 
> Now that you mention you're using it in a real life setup, what does
> top tell you about its memory usage?
> 
> > I think dans is essential because it will keep the adults from using up
> > all the bandwidth to look at porn. the secondary reason, to protect kids
> > is also important ;)
> 
> Noble causes indeed!
> 
> cheers,,
> 
> 
> 
> m