Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov

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.

After playing for a while with Fedora Directory Server I found out it to be a bit heavy for my testing machine so I decided to push it aside until I have a good testing platform.

While playing with FDS I got myself very interested in LDAP so for the change I decided to see what I can do with OpenLDAP.

One day of reading and I set up a testing NT Domain controller on Samba and OpenLDAP as a Directory Server. IDEALX have some works on integrating Samba with OpenLDAP and they provide a set of tools smbldap-tools plus step by step documentation on how to set up and administrate Samba NT Domain.

Now I am looking forward to add some mail server to the directory system and if it will go ok I am thinking about FTP and other possible things to have a complete system powered by the directory :)

Ok, lets continue with the Fedora Directory Server.

First of all I have some screenshots. They do not cover the whole GUI but instead show main windows and tabs and some dialogs.

Second: while reading the docs I found out not only that the directory feels good with import/export of LDIF (I have tried with standard OpenLDAP migration tools) but can also syncronize with M$ Active Directory and (EVEN) with M$ NT4 Domain PDC (for user/group information). This seems to be cool since I know that even M$ Active Directory has some problems communicating with NT4.

I have tried to set up SSL with self singed certificates and found out that there is a whole chapter in the docs describing how to do it and a couple of tools/scripts are provided with the installation to help with generation of the certificates. All the management of the certificates can be easily done through GUI.

I would also like to note that although I ignored a message of low RAM on my machine (128MB) during the installation – everything works fast and good.

Ok, I have installed the Fedora Directory Server. Installation is quite strait-forward, configuration is done through simple wizard and is very easy.

Next step is Management Console. It is a java-based (I guess so) interface with lots and lots of things inside that I do not know :( :)

Anyway – I decided to study all of it so I am currently downloading tons of PDF files from redhat and I gonna read all of them in the NEAREST future since I really believe that this is something great and that I have (or no – MUST) no it :)