wireless network, & net nanny query

Get a draytek, its about £130 but what it offers over others is that I have not touched it for around five months.

Draytek do quite a lot of routers / modem / firewall boxes with I expect one for every pocket and every need.

Matt

Although I'm an Apple user at home. I do have to use PCs on occasions. I'd recommend you try Cyberpatrol. There's a free 14 day trial. It is made by Surf Control who are pretty good at filtering out most of the garbage sites on the Internet.

Wireless router - there are lots. Get one that supports 802.11g and has WPA security. A built in NAT firewall is nice, but no substitute for Zone Alarm and some good anti-spyware stuff on your PC. I would consider the Airport Express; it works with a PC as well as a Mac. I use a conventional Airport, but I think you need a Mac to set it up - I've not noticed any PC software in the box.

Thanks for the info guys. I've just started as a foster carer, & need to control access, as well as freeing up my main computer for my business. I will start investigating your recommendations.
matt.

I'd agree with what Gary said, also have a look at Zyxel.

I also need a wireless ADSL router and whilst I'd love a Draytek they are a lot of money for a home user.

Zyxel seem to come very well regarded, and are around a third of the price at £70 - the wireless Drayteks are a lot of money IMHO.

cheers,
Paul

Paul

I've used the ZyXel in a test lab and it worked really well. By that I mean I plugged it in and set it up and then got on with what I wanted to do an it worked faultlessly even over Eircom broadband.

Lots of European ISPs supply ZyXel's as the standard router for their bundled services (Italia Telecom, Telefonica, SwissCom and BT), Deutche Telecom use DrayTek BTW.

So a ZyXel will work fine, as will a DrayTek or Telindus or Cisco and, of course, the Airport Express. Just get which ever one has the best deal.

Rotf

quote:

Originally posted by manicatel:
I also need to get some sort of parental control set up for my pc. My anti-virus prog. doesn't offer anything, & I'd rather not go to AOL, so any ideas of progs to recommend?
Thanks, matt.

Very seriously, get a second computer (doesn't have to be a quick one, a Celeron with 128 ram will do) and install Censornet for free (http://www.censornet.com), and set up your other computers to use it as a proxy. Comes with over 30000 blacklisted sites built-in and a series of banned phrases which is very comprehensive. It analyses the requested pages for these phrases so by definition will block search engine requests for such material. An optional blacklist update service is available (about 150 quid I think). You can even subscribe to an image filtering plugin, which to my knowledge is unique among such devices - it analyses skin tone and lines to filter out pornographic junk. Not 100% effective but better than not having this option!

You can group users and apply different access profiles including whitelist-only or filtered, you can even set up custom profiles to change these settings in 5 minute increments.

I could go on about computer access settings, but basically this thing is about as comprehensive as it gets and schools all over the world use it!

iDunno,et al. Thanks for the advice. I've bookmarked the censornet site. I have bought a 2nd laptop so the kids can use that, keeping my main computer in the office for me only. Now all I need to do is to work out how to set up this "proxy" (are you sure that has an r in it!) thing.
Thanks, matt.

quote:

Originally posted by manicatel:
iDunno,et al. Thanks for the advice. I've bookmarked the censornet site. I have bought a 2nd laptop so the kids can use that, keeping my main computer in the office for me only. Now all I need to do is to work out how to set up this "proxy" (are you sure that has an r in it!) thing.
Thanks, matt.

The instructions are a bit out of date, but here is the quick version:

You must have a computer with two network cards.
You can either set it up as a firewall AND proxy server using both cards, or as a sideways proxy behind an existing firewall using only one (which will likely be a PCI based one if the other is builtin). We have ours running behind a firewall and it works a treat, though in your case it sounds like it will do everything you want in one box in firewall mode.

Download the iso file and burn it to disc.
Download the update and save it on your client computer.
Boot the computer from the iso disc, Censornet installs itself.
log into the Censornet box ("root" user, "root" password, "setup")
Set up your network card address/es and other settings.
After this, the box is basically working even if it doesn't give much information (that's Linux for you!)

Once this has been done, set your client computer network address to the same subnet, open a web browser to the IP address of the Censornet box

eg http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80

where :80 is the port which accesses the administration pages. Log in as admin using the default password (admin) or whatever you set in the Censornet setup.
Run the update from here.
Once you have got this far it should be relatively easy to set up computer and user accounts, and client access.

Assuming you are using Internet Explorer, goto Tool/Internet Options/Connections/LAN Settings, and set the proxy server as the censornet address on port 8080, bypass for local, and in Advanced, enter the censornet address under exceptions (this is required in order for proxy clients to send in unblock requests which run through port 81).

That's basically it, unless you want to authenticate with a Windows domain in which case you need to make sure that the Censoret Application time is the same as the Censornet BIOS time, and network time!