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GEARHEAD INSIDE THE NETWORK MACHINE

In previous Gearhead columns we have discussed our quest to find network and IT solutions for a nonprofit school. Products and systems for this kind of environment must be cheap, easy to set up, cheap, easy to manage, cheap and easy to troubleshoot.

One of the biggest areas of concern for schools is Internet filtering. We tried using a router from a well-known vendor that included a filtering capability but it caused major problems with all kinds of software on the network - notably Microsoft Office - so we switched off the filtering.

Since then we have been looking for a simple and manageable filtering product, and yesterday we found what looks like a workable solution.The product is CCProxy fromYoungzsoft.

CCProxy is small (less than 750K bytes), installs quickly and easily and can run as an NT service.The product's user interface is equally simple. Instead of a menu bar it offers a tool ribbon with buttons for start and stop, options setup, account setup, registration, exit, hide to system tray and help.

The options setup lets you configure which protocols and services will be offered by the proxy You can define custom ports for each protocol, including HTTP/RSTP, secure HTTP (HTTPS), FTP (both regular and Web), Gopher, SOCKS/MMS, Telnet and NNTP CCProxy also can provide proxy services on standard ports for SMTP and DNS. It supports a Web cache, remote dial-up support, auto startup with Windows, auto hide to the system tray and port mapping (the ability to redirect requests for a specific port on a target server to a different port on another server).

CCProxy can be configured to allow or deny access in a variety of ways. It can restrict access only to sites on a whitelist, allow access to all sites except those on a blacklist, obey a combination of those criteria, block access to any specified file or content type (for example,all .exe files), or block access to content containing keywords (for example,"buy now").

You can define those criteria for groups of users defined by IP or media access control, by logon name and password, or by a combination of those techniques. To that you can add restrictions on the time of day and day of week that access is allowed,and define maximum use throughput rates.

We plan to disable direct outgoing access to the Web (both HTTP and HTTPS) at the firewall/router and allow access only via the CCProxy server. We will set up an account under CCProxy and define all the IP addresses on the network that allow outgoing access, and configure the product to allow access only to specific destinations.

Rather than buying a service that lists all unacceptable sites, the teachers will define the Web sites that meet their needs and as students ask for other sites to be added the staff will consider whether to do so.

There really is a lot to like in CCProxy - it has a Web management interface, excellent reporting and logging features, and even can be translated into another language.

CCProxy is highly suitable for simple filtering, as it can use an externally defined whitelist or blacklist provided as a simple text file with a site specification such as "*.nwfusion.com"on each line.

The only problem is that to make any changes in the external list active the CCProxy server needs to be restarted. We have written to the developers asking for a scheduled restart (say every hour) or a restart based on whether the control file's time stamp has been modified, but we have yet to hear back from them.

In the interim we have a few choices. The simplest and least expensive is to set up a job schedule to run a utility such as psService in Sysinternals' tool kit (which is free - see www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder: 4544). This is a tool for listing, starting, stopping and suspending system services.

PsService can be run in a batch file, and the command "psservice restart ccproxy" will do exactly what you might expect - restart the service and reload the blacklist or whitelist file contents.We plan to have the command executed every day at 4 a.m.

We also plan to provide a simple editing interface, perhaps using Interactive Tools Page Publisher to let the staff add to and modify the blacklist/whitelist file (see "Outstanding user-driven publishing," DocFinder: 4546).

Next week we'll fire up this system and see if it works. So far, we are impressed by CCProxy's stability and its amazingly reasonable $70 price tag. Moreover, there appears to be nothing else quite like it.

Send your proxy solution to gear/lead @gibbs.com.