DansGuardian, written by SmoothWall Ltd and others, is

content-control software An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Content-control software det ...

: software designed to control which websites users can access. It also includes virus filtering and usage monitoring features. DansGuardian must be installed on a

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

computer, such as a server computer; its filtering extends to all computers in an organization, including

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

and

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

computers. DansGuardian is used by schools, businesses, value-added

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...

s, and others. As of now, DansGuardian is no longer maintained. Its successor is named "e2guardian".

Technical details

DansGuardian is distributed under the

GPLv2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

free software license, and written using the C++ programming language. It primarily runs in

and other Unixes. It is entirely command line and web-based, and meant to be used in conjunction with a web proxy such as

Squid True squid are molluscs with an elongated soft body, large eyes, eight arms, and two tentacles in the superorder Decapodiformes, though many other molluscs within the broader Neocoleoidea are also called squid despite not strictly fitting ...

Graphical configuration tools

The Ubuntu Christian Edition Linux distribution includes a graphical user interface (GUI) tool for configuring DansGuardian. The tool does not work as well as the configuration tools included with

SmoothWall Smoothwall (formerly styled as SmoothWall) is a Linux distribution designed to be used as an open source firewall. Smoothwall is configured via a web-based GUI and requires little or no knowledge of Linux to install or use. Smoothwall is also a ...

Guardian, and other web filters.

Zentyal Zentyal (previously known as eBox Platform) is an open source email and groupware solution based on Ubuntu Linux. Zentyal used to implement Microsoft Exchange Server protocols on top of standard open source components (such as Dovecot, Postf ...

has the option to use Dansguardian as a proxy server with a web interface. There is a graphical user interface available for Ubuntu, called WebContentControl, which was designed to install and configure DansGuardian,

FireHOL FireHOL is a shell script designed as a wrapper for iptables written to ease the customization of the Linux kernel's firewall netfilter. FireHOL is free software and open-source, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Fir ...

and Tinyproxy easily. WebContentControl is no longer maintained.

Blocklist Sources

The url filtering capabilities of DansGuardian depend largely on the Blocklists, several options are available. Gratis lists can be found at Shallalist.de, Université Toulouse 1 Capitole and commercial lists can be found at Squidblacklist.org.

Legal details

In the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

, DansGuardian satisfies the requirements of

Children's Internet Protection Act The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is one of a number of bills that the United States Congress proposed to limit children's exposure to pornography and explicit content online. Background Both of Congress's earlier attempts at restri ...

Proprietary versions

Two proprietary versions of DansGuardian exist: as part of

Limited Firewalls and as stand-alone product Smoothwall SWG.

Forks

There exists a fork of Dansguardian Project called MinD. Its name is a

recursive acronym A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hof ...

for "MinD is not Dansguardian". The "Toy" version of MinD is a fork of DansGuardian version 2.10.1.1 with some improvements. MinD development began in July 2010, but stalled in December 2011. A fork of Dansguardian with many improvements and bug fixes, e2Guardian is a web content filtering proxy that works in conjunction with another caching proxy such as Squid or Oops. This project was initiated by Frédéric Bourgeois and E2bn.E2bn website
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References

{{reflist Content-control software Free network-related software