RouterNotes.com

With the URLfilter addon installed, an IPcop firewall can be turned into a free content-filtering web gateway perfect for a church, non-profit organization or home office. Access to inappropriate sites whether they be pornagraphic or just not work-related will be denied automatically at the firewall. Both IPcop and URLfilter are free to download and use.

Why IPcop?
IPcop differs from most internet routers and firewalls because it has proxy software built-in. At first glance, a proxy server doesn’t do anything more than a standard router. Both will allow multiple computers inside the network to access websites on the internet, but a proxy servers looks at the actual web address in order to get a web page. For example, a standard router will recognize that a computer is visiting a website out on the internet whereas a proxy server understands that a computer is visiting www.MSN.com/music or www.msn.com/jobs. By looking at the full web address, IPcop can create internet access logs accurate down to the actual web page that was visited. IPcop and other free firewalls are compared in this article.
Another handy trick that IPcop can do is proxy web traffic transparently. Most proxy servers require users to make configuration changes to Internet Explorer or Firefox to use them, but that is not the case with IPcop. Web traffic can be proxied, logged and filtered without any configuration at the workstation and most users will never know that their web traffic is being analyzed. If a network administrator is just interested in keeping a detailed web access log, then IPcop can do that by? default. URL Filter adds the filtering capability.
Why URL filter?
URL filter (Short for Universal Resource Locater Filter) just adds a module to IPcop that helps it make decisions on whether to process a computer request for a web page. It makes decisions two ways. It keeps a list of known unacceptable websites and blocks those and it keeps a list of bad words and blocks anything with one of those bad words in the name. URL filter can be configured to download new lists of bad words and sites automatically.

Read the rest of this entry »

Had the pleasure of having to hack our own church
website. The church office kept getting calls about the pianos for sale on the front page of the website even though the pianos were sold weeks ago. Seems the previous webmaster got away with the
content management password, leaving the big ‘ole piano
for sale sign on the front page. I e-mailed the previous webmaster, but didn’t return the e-mails.

Now, I tried to hide all technical knowledge at Church because there are usually enough computer hobyists that are eager to take on projects like Church websites, but eventually word gets out. One day I told someone how to clean spyway off of their computer and within a couple of months, I had de-infested spyway from six computers around the Church.

But back to the hacking. We had the hosting account password, so I tried to get
into the sql database to reset the password and ended up
toasting the website! The main page just coughed up a bunch of sql errors. I can only spell sql, so I found
an sql guy and he helped me add some accounts into the
sql db and then we went into the dotnetnuke config and matched up the accounts to the account info.

After all of that, getting the pianos off of the frontpage was a snap!
I like to think of it as ordained hacking!