Installing and Configuring SQUIDGUARD on Ubuntu 10.10

Squidguard is a content filtering daemon that working in conjunction with Squid proxy on Linux. Many articles have been written that discusses installation and configuration. Most notably for Ubuntu see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SquidGuard. This document briefly outlines what I did to get it working in my environment.

1. sudo apt-get install squid

2. sudo apt-get install squidguard

3. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

This install squid and squidguard on the system. The following are the working directories and files

/etc/squid - squid and squidguard configuration folders

/usr/bin/squidGuard - application file

/var/log/squid - default squid and squidguard logging folder

/var/lib/squidguard/db - location of blocking database files

Now to go to the configuration...

1. Download a list of publicly available database blacklists. In my case I got them from urlblacklist.com.

2. As root, extract the contents into /var/lib/squidguard/db. The compressed file has a blacklist subfolder in it. Copy the items under this compressed subfolder into /var/lib/squidguard/db. The folder structure should now be /var/lib/squidguard/db/<category>.

3. As root, alter the ownership of all files in /var/lib/squidguard/db and under to the proxy account. Issue the command sudo chown -R proxy:proxy /var/lib/squidguard/db to accomplish this.

4. Change permissions on all of these files using the command sudo chmod -R 755 /var/lib/squidguard/db. While this is not the most secure thing, it's the only way I got it to work.

5. Modify the squid.conf file in /etc/squid to do the following:
a. Locate the url_rewrite_program line to read url_rewrite_program /usr/bin/squidGuard –c /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf
b. Uncomment #http_access allow localnet
c. Add visible_hostname localhost

6. Save the squid.conf file

7. Alter the squidGuard.conf file in /etc/squid to perform the following:
a. Remove all entries after logdir /var/log/squid
b. Add category definitions and acl lists in the following format:

dest <category_name> {
domainlist <category_name>/domains
urllist <category_name>/urls
}
acl {
default {
pass !<category_name>
redirect http://<url_of_blocking_page>
}

}

Note: THis file can have multiple dest categories. The category_names are those extracted in step 2. If blocking multiple categories, specify those as multiple category entries in the acl section. For noob's (!) means to block the list contents

8. Save the file and change the owner to proxy by issuing the command sudo chown proxy:proxy /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf

9. Issue the following commands to change permissions on these required files:

chmod 644 /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf
chmod -R 644 /var/log/squid/
chmod 755 /var/log/squid

10. Import all definitions configured in squidGuard.conf by issuing the command sudo squidGuard -C all.

11. Restart squidguard by issuing sudo squid -k reconfigure

12. Verify proper startup by reviewing the logs in /var/log/squid/squidGuard.log

Squidguard is now configured. Set the client to proxy all requests through <squid_server>:3128