I am using Squid proxy as a standard thing on firewalls to speed up web browsing for LANs, but I never tried to do something more with squid that default configuration + some securing with ACLs.
Today I came across SquidGuard which helps a lot if one need to restrict access by clients/domains/urls/expressions and it turned out to be quite a good software. Although I did only some basic configuration it seems to be quite fast and flexible with doing it\’s job.
Another tool that I have set up was Ad Zapping which main aim is to remove banners/ad popups/ad javascript and related stuff from the pages. The idea is common – it just replaces all the crap with transparent images, empty HTML pages and useless javascript files.
After setting everything up I decided to test the system and went to a couple of web sites like MSN, Hotmail and Yahoo – funny, but all of them look so empty without banners :)
Next thing to do with Squid is set some antivirus software for it.