DansGuardian, written by SmoothWall Ltd and others, is content-control software: 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 or Linux computer, such as a server computer; its filtering extends to all computers in an organization, including Windows and Macintosh computers. DansGuardian is used by schools, businesses, value-added Internet service providers, and others.[1]
As of now, DansGuardian is no longer maintained. Its successor is named "e2guardian".
DansGuardian is distributed under the GPLv2 free software license, and written using the C++ programming language. It primarily runs in Linux 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.
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 Guardian, and other web filters.Шаблон:Citation needed
Zentyal 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which was designed to install and configure DansGuardian, FireHOL and Tinyproxy easily.[2] WebContentControl is no longer maintained.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,[3] Université Toulouse 1 Capitole [4] and commercial lists could be found at Squidblacklist.org.[5]
Two proprietary versions of DansGuardian exist: as part of SmoothWall Limited Firewalls and as stand-alone product Smoothwall SWG.[6]
Forks
There exists a fork of Dansguardian Project called MinD.[7] Its name is a recursive acronym 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,[8] but stalled in December 2011.[9]
A fork of Dansguardian with many improvements and bug fixes, e2Guardian[10] 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[11] and E2bn.[12]