Easiest way to restrict IP access per user on ubuntu

Question

I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on an old laptop for my daughter and want to be able to restrict which web sites she can access.

I would like to have a white list of addresses she can access. Can anyone suggest the easiest way to manage this?

Answer 1

Configure your network so that the laptop can't connect directly to the internet at all.

Set up the web browser in the laptop to talk to a web proxy system you've configured.

Run privoxy on this system, configured with a whitelist.

Answer 2

Filtering domain names is better (and easier) than controlling IPs (and they change...).

An existing and known package for Ubuntu is DansGuardian.

It requires the installation of a small proxy: the instructions in the link should be pretty straightforward.

Answer 3

You can do this pretty easily through IPTables. You just need to setup some OUTPUT rules that drop all traffic except to known good IPs.

Be careful though, many big sites don't have one IP for all their web servers, so this might not work as well as you would hope.

Answer 4

If you do not want to install a proxy as @ring0 suggests I think you should try out OpenDNS, it is easy to setup and filter sites. It should be able to do the task. They have categories to filter sites based on content (like adult material).

Answer 5

For what its worth. I found an ubuntu distribution called edubuntu which is targeted towards kids. This comes installed with something called Gnome Nanny.