Happy Holidays & Version 1.1.5

[Eric]

I've been out of town for the past week, for the holidays -- hence the lack of development/forum posts recently. Sorry for any inconvenience that may have caused.

One other thing I'd like to mention with respect to the forum: There's a tradeoff between the time I spend answering forum posts and the time I spend actually developing Gargoyle (adding features/fixing bugs). In the past year the number of posts on the forum has grown dramatically, and (unfortunately) I can't address every single post personally (I have to prioritize).

However, keep posting! I often have time to read a post, but not to immediately respond to it/give it the attention it deserves. It's very useful to me to see what issues are important to you guys, even if I can't give you a personal response. I don't think I ever responded to one of the several posts asking for a fix for Australian time zones, but I implemented it in 1.1.4 anyway, because so many people asked.

Finally, a huge thank you to everyone who has taken time to respond to questions posted on the forum and help others trouble-shoot minor problems. It's incredibly helpful to me when someone else answers a question like this, so I don't need to respond. I especially want to thank DoesItMatter for helping out with this on a regular basis.

Overall, 2009 has been a great year for Gargoyle. The average number of downloads per day has roughly quadrupled compared to the same time last year. Gargoyle couldn't have gotten this far without everyone's helpful suggestions and bug reports, so I want to say "Thank you" to everyone who has contributed on the forum and via email (as I said, keep posting!). Hopefully, 2010 will see similar increases in features and popularity!

And finally, a bugfix release...

New in v1.1.5:

• Fixes several issues with "All other individual" quotas, introduced in 1.1.3. These other individual quotas now display properly in Status/Quota Usage section, and erroneous duplicate quotas no longer show up.

[DoesItMatter]

May your new year be great and may your code be great too!

I hope you have some great success with this firmware.

I barely use most of the features but its just so much fun to mess
around with new stuff and help others out with it.

I think the functionality is working quite well, so my next fun is
probably going to center around trying to setup stuff like
quotas and blocking etc, and then see if I can break it / bypass it.

Better to take pre-emptive strikes than try to fix it after the fact!

[cwcchap]

Thank to you Eric, you have made my life a lot easier with the quotas.

I would love to see some parental controls in future versions.

Enjoy the celebrations into 2010.

[BikeMike]

Hi cwcchap,
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "parental controls" as this is precisely what I use Gargoyle fore (daily download limits and enforced cutoff times at night).

Hi Eric,
Happy holidays to you also, we all need a break some time. Certainly no need to apologize for that!

I still have a small issue with quotas in 1.1.5, I've been testing stuff, adding and removing quotas individually and by IP range. Sorry I don't remember the exact sequence I did everything. Now I have ended up with several IPs shown twice on the quota status page. Looking at the page source they are there once for "ALL_OTHERS_INDIVIDUAL" and once for the specific IP too. The usage seems to be counted correctly against the IP specific quota.

My speculation on the cause...
I guess the router remembers in a table somewhere those IPs that have had usage against them while an "all others" quota is in effect. But once a specific quota is added for one of those, it needs to be removed from that table?

See .120 and .121 IPs in the screenshot below.
Also I don't know why the router's own IP is shown in quotas?

[cwcchap]

I am looking for the following in parental controls:

1) Restricting access to certain websites based on the url.
2) Restricting access to certain websites based on keywords.
3) Alerts when pre-defined criteria, based on for e.g url visited is met.

I realise we are working with the limitations of the routers memory, but any control over the content and not just the time aspect will be great.

Keep up the good work.

[BikeMike]

1) Restricting access to certain websites based on the url.
2) Restricting access to certain websites based on keywords.
3) Alerts when pre-defined criteria, based on for e.g url visited is met.

1. You can do this in access restrictions based on full or partial URL, Domain, even using regular expression matching. Not sure how efficient this is and how much router memory/CPU load it would cause if you had a large list of matches. Maintaining this list manually would be a nightmare unless you just want to block a few specific sites.

2. If you mean keywords within the url, see point 1. If you mean keywords within the webpage then no.

3. Gargoyle doesn't have any form of alerts that I know of.

As a better solution for this I can recommend K9 Web Protection http://www1.k9webprotection.com, it is free, easy to install and difficult (impossible?) to bypass. Very configurable for lots of different categories. But obviously this is a per-PC distributed system so if you have many PCs in the household it takes a bit of effort to set up.

[cwcchap]

Thanks a million BikeMike,

I never saw the url options as "Restricted Resources" was ticked.

Your'e a star.

[nice]

You might consider setting up an account at opendns.com. You can then manage content blocking through their online dashboard. Then, any machine on your network using the opendns servers will have your policies enforced. Currently, I use their minimal filtering level to protect against phishing attacks. This will only work if opendns knows your ip address, so be sure to use an updating client if you have a dynamic ip. They also have a SmartCache feature that makes it possible to visit websites that might be getting hammered with traffic that would be unreachable otherwise.

Edit: you can use gargoyle as your dynamic dns client under connection >> dynamic dns

[cwcchap]

nice, you are a legend.

Opendns.com is just what I was looking for.

I have set Gargoyle to update the dynamic dns as well as restrict users to only use the opendns servers.

Thanks a million.

[Eric]

BikeMike: You're right,there is a bug there. If other individual quotas were active previously, then you add a quota with one of those ips, the old individual quota doesn't get erased right away.

I'm working on a fix now (though the fix for this is somewhat non-trivial). Expect a new release with this fix within the next week.