I'm posting this here because I may write a Perl NNTP proxy to do what already exists in another package. Though the joys of writing my own would be great, I would be willing to abandon this effort if there were another (easier) way to accomplish what I want. Besides, I get enough joy writing Perl at work all day long. :-)

Here is what I want to do:

I have a home network that uses a Linux host to IP masquerade a number of PCs. To the ISP I am one host, inside my house I am many.
I want to be able to restrict what Usenet groups are available, but rather than use content-based filtering, like most of the commercial products (I can handle HTTP seperately), I want to base my newsgroup filtering on a whitelist of newsgroups. This can be a hierarchy, such as alt.binaries.sounds.* or just a single group like alt.pictures.scenic. I want to do this not from the client machines on the network, but from the Linux server that is serving up IP to everybody, so that I have maximum control on how I do it.

What I want to know is this: Is there already a collection of tools that would handle this for me, or would I write an NNTP proxy in Perl and create a service for it on my MASQuerader that would represent the news service?

Currently I use IP-CHAINS to handle firewall issues, but I'm not aware that I can get the granularity with CHAINs that I want.

You thoughts, brethren, are always appreciated.

Brian - a.k.a. DrSax

In reply to NNTP filtering and whitelists by DrSax

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