Background
I have a young family and we have 4 windows10 laptops and an imac, as well as iphones on our home network. As you can imagine, the kids are fast becoming experts as negotiating their way around/through both my microsoft family parental controls and also, the firewall settings on our home isp gateway.
Question
I was thinking of setting up an internet proxy using one of my computer systems here, and routing all internet access for other desktop, laptops, phones, as well as our television/home entertainment system through it.
My thoughts are to:
use Linux as the basis
be able to selectively add restrictions via device or even better user level controls (that way higher level users are not restricted on any device in the same way the kids are)
Is virtualmin suitable for doing this kind of thing or am i better off just using something like ubuntu with gnome desktop interface?
I was wondering about the idea of substituting WAN for LAN with everything and doing this all inside Virtualmin on a home network, and then proxying through virtualmin to the outside world. I am not even sure i can get my head around what i am attempting to do yet…so help me please with the structure and details of how this might be done.
In this scenario I think you’d be better of with something like pihole, that’s what I do. Sure, it was created to block ads, but can be combined with other blockings as well.
Also you would need to remove the possibility of someone using their own DNS, I do that by masquerading port 53 on the router.
Alternatively go for something router-ish like pfsense, vyatta or similar.
For what it’s worth - I use dd-wrt on a Cisco router. Has ACL’s based on MAC\IP and flexible enough for dictating what the kids can browse and when. Altho - if you kids are savvy enough they could just reset it and be off and away - so you would have to restrict physical access to the router itself.
I did see a post somewhere for doing something similar using a Raspberry Pi.
You don’t need virtualmin for a proxy. You’re not hosting domains, which is what virtualmin does. webmin on the other hand can be handy for configuring a bare bones linux server which can act as a caching and blocking proxy. Install linux on anything, doesn’t need a ton of power. and raspberry pi is enough. Then install squid proxy server. Configure router to use the proxy or configure all clients to use the proxy. Only thing I hate about squid is the way rules are setup. No exactly user friendly.
yeah a network administrator in a school i taught at years ago used squid…i could never make sense of it. They eventually went to a full windows server environment. that is costly obviously and not something i want to do so linux is my preference.
the reason i was thinking Virtualmin was to kind of substitute the whole domains things for computers but the opposite way around…flip it (if that makes sense).
Instead of hosting, it would be a means of the domains/computers on the inside, being able to see outside and access outside (domains allow the outside to look in, this would be allowing the inside systems to see out…do you see what i am getting at?)