gutsy and regular PCs on edubuntu lan

Jim Kronebusch jim at winonacotter.org
Wed Oct 31 13:06:27 GMT 2007


> > I would suggest a firewall/filtering product is required for this need.
> > Maybe edubuntu should try to provide it, I don't know, but the current
> > product is really not aimed at that.
> >
> >   
> yes, but ...
> 
> edubuntu is supposed to be a easy self contained system that non IT 
> people can use and install. Setting up a firewall/filtering system is 
> another ball game way above the level of knowledge of most teachers I know,
> and having a parental control in school is something compulsory
> 
> that's why I say not having it by default is a bug.
> 
> have a good day or night

Philippe, I guess this is simply a matter of interpretation.  To myself and many others,
if Edubuntu is by default supposed to be easy to setup for a teacher on an existing
network, a content filter would be too much.  A proper network in a school would already
have a content filter in place.  Having a content filter setup on a default install,
could either interfere with filtering in place, or cause problems for the person who
installed the Edubuntu server because they do not know how to make adjustments to the
content filter which could give them a poor user experience as well.

However it would be nice if there was a simple default filtering package that could be
selected and installed needing little to no configuration.  An example is Ubuntu
Christian Edition.  This comes by default with a real nice gui and dansguarding/squid
already installed.  I have wondered how easy it would be to make this filtering package
available for other Ubuntu distributions.  

On that note you could probably use the Ubuntu Christina Edition CD on your server then
apt-get install the ltsp componenets.  But that could easily be more difficult than
adding content filtering to the default Edubuntu setup.

Anyhow my point is, the most common need for Edubuntu is make a default package that can
easily be place on an existing network in a school without interfering with existing
equipment and not affect current network/filtering rules.  Does that make sense?  Of
course no default installation will ever be perfect for everyone.  Which is why more
features to add the exceptions would be nice, and I'm sure are on the way.

If you wanted to set up a separate box for content filtering, IPCop with the
Dansguardian add-on is fairly straight forward to set up.  And the ipcop.org website has
pretty decent documentation.  

Hope this helps,
Jim

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