THought I would recommend a wonderful little linux distro that does everything your needing on one machine – Astaro (.com, http://ftp.astaro.com) you can use it at home for up to 10 PC’s for free.

I could take a deep breath and tell you everything it does, but as a fellow engineer, I’ll just say that you’d be doing yourself a dis-service if you didn’t try it out for a solution to your home problems (believe me, I have 4 boys!). The ISO I believe is about 400mb and there’s a 700mb virtual appliance that you can use clustered as well (enterprise applications).

Cheers and thanks for all the good posts.

Paul

And for the record – if someone was semi technically literate, and say flashed their linksys router with an aftermarket BIOS they probably would have been hosed – unless they were exceptionally persistent.

Actually, I’m not really upset with my daughter, and I am a bit proud of her that she figured out how to bypass the proxy. For her, honestly, it’s less about accessing inappropriate content and more about limiting the hours during which she can access the Internet. (That’s the problem with laptops and wireless access.) Besides which, as you’ve so rightly pointed out, there are other factors to consider, and all of those factors tell me that–aside from spending too much time online–I don’t really have too much to worry about from my Honor Roll daughter.

No worries about my wife, either–she’s fully supportive of the changes! I’m a lucky man, I guess.

Thanks for the response!

And if she can, then the very LEAST of your worries is that she’s viewing inappropriate content. When my own geek son started using the internet a hundred years ago, my friends were worried he’d look at “inapproriate pictures of women.” First, I told my son there are no real women who will do that for you. And second, I tell my friends, I’m much more concerned he’s learning to make bombs! Fifteen years later.. all is well in my house! No hooker wives, no hooker’s children and no bombs!

You ask:

After all this progress in computer hardware, applications, and networking, and we are still unable to accurately diagnose problems without going to multiple sources?

I suggest it’s the same problem with our kids… We want to believe them… I think we SHOULD believe them! But you can’t ignore the value of input from other sources in the raising of them: report cards, other kid’s parents, other kids, other sibs. And the list goes on.

Best of luck to ya — with the network and with the kids and wait til your wife starts complaining about the changes you’ve made before you head out the door! — You think the kids are bad!

You added extra complexity to the network because you are technically inclined, and were able t debug it because you are so inclined.