I’ve lost count of the number of times parents have asked me how to block internet use on their home PCs. Usually it’s because their kids have been caught visiting sites they shouldn’t have been allowed to go to and the completely clueless parents had no idea what their kids were doing until it was too late. Why anyone would allow their kids totally unsupervised acess on an internet connected machine is beyond me, but it happens. I hear some of you yelling, “Get to point Nate, what did you tell all those people who asked?!”

Usually the answer I gave varied depending on who was asking, but almost always it centered around dumping Windows entirely for the machine in question. This is usually NOT what people want to hear because they have a comfort level with Windows - they think of themselves as competent on a computer because they can use Windows and moving away from Windows woulld be to leave that comfort zone. But, if truth be known, it’s the best solution because it costs nothing to implement aside from a little time, allows you to repurpose an old machine (the usual desire anyway), and it offers a *far* more robust and secure platform than the old version of Windows 98 which is usually the only Windows that otherwise runs decently on the old box. (Linux is much leaner and runs really well on old hardware).

By the time I’ve mentioned Linux, the askers have already tuned me out, and have decided to go seek advice from their MCSE friends and family who will certainly offer saner advice than this crackpot Linux geek, but that’s all for the good since its one less person I have to support on my day off when their computer is frozen with viruses again. I don’t pretend to know what Windows solutions are the best choice to do your job as a parent for you and make sure your kids aren’t visiting hard core porn sites while you sip martini’s in the basement with your friends. I *do* know that you can get an awesome solution with free software pretty easily.

There are several things that matter here - is the computer shared? Is it shared between you and the kids, or do just the kids share it? Are the kids all the same age and have the same restrictions or do they differ? Do you want to block *everything* and allow just some sites, or allow *almost* everything and block just some bad sites you know of? Do you want to block just the web, or are you concerned about IRC, nntp, bit torrent, peer to peer sharing networks, VOIP / skype, email access… at this point most of the people I talk to are physically walking away. Most folks don’t know there is anything more to the internet than “www”.

In my case the rules are pretty much the same for both kids, so I’m not worrying about granting more access to the older one (yet). I use the machine occassionally, but largely it’s a ‘kids’ machine, set up in the center of the house where we can all see it - NOT in a kid’s room. The machine was bought new with Windows ME on it which was a dismal situation all told. Since I won’t use illegal copies of Windows, I installed the free ubuntu linux on this kid’s machine (an old PIII 800MHz Dell). They each have their own account with their own preferences and programs installed. If the machine was a laptop or had multiple interfaces (wireless + ethernet), I might have chosen another solution, but since the machine is a desktop with only one interface, I chose firestarter. Easily installed using ‘apt-get install firestarter’, it could just as easily be installed using the synaptic install tool. Configuring firestarter is very easy. Once you explain to someone what an inbound connection and an outbound one is, the rest is fairly straightforward. My kids are currently allowed to visit several internet sites including pbskids.org, noggin.com, and webkinz.com, but not much else. Therefore, I configured firestarter to run as ‘restrictive’ which means I must create a ‘whitelist’ of websites that they can access. Since the list is so short right now it’s no big deal, though I expect that this may become a hassle someday as they get older, but for now it’s perfectly acceptable from a management standpoint.