[Techtalk] media files
Conor Daly
conor.daly at oceanfree.net
Mon Sep 24 01:09:15 EST 2001
On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 03:12:39PM -0400 or so it is rumoured hereabouts,
Subba Rao thought:
>
> Hello again,
>
> Now that I got some tools to play media (video) files, I went to search for
> AVI, MOV and DVD files. The Web sites have very few files with any educational
> or interesting media files. The Usenet sites have nothing but porn. How do I
> block the porn media files? The caveat is that I would like to access usenet
> server for some newsgroups in comp.* rec.* athome.* and misc.*. I access my
> ISP's news server.
>
> The main goal is to block the crut files from Usenet. They do have files that
> pander to everyones desires.
>
> What are the most effective practices to block such content from the Internet?
Seems like you should be able to do something with leafnode and some
creative firewall rules.
Leafnode is a local news server. It is designed for small scale
applications and uses "fetchnews" to retrieve usenet groups of interest
from external servers. It is fairly configurable and has a few options
that *could* be what you need. To restrict access only to those groups
you wish, you can use a combination of the "expire" and "groupexpire"
options. setting "expire = 0" and setting "groupexpire comp.* = 10" will
cause texpire to expire all groups in zero days except for the comp.*
groups which will be expired after 10 days. I'm not sure if expire = 0
will work but it may do. In that case, you would need to have fetchnews
run to collect news and immediately follow that with a run of texpire to
expire any group that downloads.
You could also edit the "/var/spool/news/leaf.node/groupinfo" file to list only
those groups you wish to allow. If you make that read-only, fetchnews should be
unable to update it. This may cause fetchnews to fail entirely or it may
just fail to update the groups list.
In your firewall, you block access to any
external port 119 from your internal lan and allow access only to your
leafnode server on port 119. This will of course prevent fetchnews from
connecting to any news servers either. So, you should configure fetchnews
to use another port (say 20119) and have your firewall redirect that to an
external port 119. Of course, a savvy user will be able to redirect a
newsreader program to use that port and your firewall will happily
redirect for them also. If you have a seperate IP address for your
leafnode server, you could have the firewall only allow that IP external
access.
That's terribly confused init?
Conor
--
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>
Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
Faenor.cod.ie
12:46am up 101 days, 1:05, 0 users, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
Hobbiton.cod.ie
12:50am up 16 days, 12:20, 3 users, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
More information about the Techtalk
mailing list