| 
 
    Using Expressionlists in SquidGuard
 
| You will never be able to add a possible "bad" pages to your
domains and urls files. To achieve additional blocking
expressionlists can be used. In an expressionlist you enter words that are mostly likely
part of unwanted domains and urls. Each domains and url
will be matched against the entries found in the configured
expression lists.
 Attention: Only use expressionlists if you are sure
you do not block away innocent sites. Additionally keep in
mind that using these lists can result in a noticable
performance impact.
 
 
 
 Adding expression lists to the configuration
 Expression lists are included in the dest tag.
The example below shows the relevant part of the squidGuard
configuration file:
 
 
 
| Using expression lists to block porn |  
|  dest porn {
      domainlist       porn/domains
      urllist          porn/urls
      expressionlist   porn/expressions
 }
 |  
 You can add an expression list to each defined destination if
you find this necessary (reminder: performance!). SquidGuard
expects the expression file relative to the defined dbhome just
as the domains and urls files.
 
 
 Syntax of expression lists
 The expressionlist file format is lines with regular expressions as described
in regex(5). Of most interrest is:
 
 
 
    | . | Matches any single character (use "\." to match a
     "."). |  
    | [abc] | Matches one of the characters ("[abc]" matches a
     single "a" or "b" or
     "c"). |  
    | [c-g] | Matches one of the characters in the range ("[c-g]"
     matches a single "c" or "d" or
     "e" or "f" or "g". "[a-z0-9]" matches any single letter or digit.
 "[-/.:?]" matches any single "-" or
     "/" or "." or ":"
     or "?".).
 |  
    | ? | None or one of the preceding ("words?" will match
     "word" and "words". "[abc]?"
     matches a single "a" or "b" or
     "c" or nothing (i.e. "")).
 |  
    | * | None or more of the preceding ("words*" will match
     "word", "words" and
     "wordsssssss". ".*" will match anything
     including nothing). |  
    | + | One or more of the preceding ("xxx+" will match a
     sequence of 3 or more "x"). |  
    | (expr1|expr2) | One of the expressions, which in turn may contain a similar
     construction ("(foo|bar)" will match "foo"
     or "bar". "(foo|bar)? will match
     "foo" or "bar" or nothing
     (i.e. "")).
 |  
    | $ | The end of the line ("(foo|bar)$" will match
     "foo" or "bar"only at the end of a
     line). |  
    | \x | Disable the special meaning of x where
     x is one of the special regex characters
     ".?*+()^$[]{}\"  ("\." will match a
     single ".", "\\" a single "\" etc.) |  
 The entries to the expression lists are cleartext. Thus a start to block
possible sexual material by expression match could look like:
 
 
 
| 
(^|[-\?+=/_])(bondage|boobs?|busty?|hardcore|porno?|sex|xxx+)([-\?+=/_]|$)
 |  
 If everything is set up to your liking make the changes active by 
issuing the command:
 
 
 
 
Some notes and hints
 
 
    Unless you build your expressions very very carefully there is a
    high risk you will have annoyed users on your neck. Typically
    you might accidentally block "Essex", "Sussex", "breastcancer",
    "www.x.org" etc. in your eagerness for blocking pornographic
    material. In practice you would probably replace some of the
    words in the example above with some more clearly pornographic
    related words that I don't find appropriate to list
    here.
 
    While the size of the domain and urllists only has marginal
    influence on the performance, too many large or complex
    expressions will quickly degrade the performance of
    squidGuard. Though it may depend heavily on the performance of
    the regex library you link with.
 
    There is a set of sample files
    for a group of supposedly pornographic sites under
    samples/dest/adult in the source tree that you can use as
    a start if porn blocking is one of your tasks. Please note:
    These lists are very, very old and not intended for production
    systems. Use them to test your squidGuard. For an initial setup
    the lists will work, but we recommend that you review these lists
    before using them. Those
    domains and urls have been collected automagically by a
    robot. No manual evaluation of the corresponding contents has been
    performed. Therefor there is a chance some nonpornographic sites
    have sliped in. 
 
    To avoid publishing to your users a complete guide to banned
    sites, you probably want to have some or all of these files
    protected by for instance:
    
     where cache_effective_user and
    cache_effective_group are the values for the
    corresponding tags as defined in squid.conf.
      
       chmod 640 /wherever/filter/db/dest/adult/*chown cache_effective_user /wherever/filter/db/dest/adult/*
 chgrp cache_effective_group /wherever/filter/db/dest/adult/*
 
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