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Guide to install E2Guardian on Ubuntu Xenial

Overview

This document details the installation of E2guardian (from now on E2G) on Ubuntu Xenial 16.04.

E2Guardian does not work standalone and required a proxy to be also installed. The most common proxy software is Squid, but Ubuntu also ships other two lightweight proxies that may be installed to work with E2G, tinyproxy and oops. Examples will be provided for both proxies in the guide.

Getting E2Guardian

E2G is not available from Ubuntu repositories, but the maintainers provide a debian package. The package carries Debian in the name, but works just fine on Ubuntu Xenial.

To get it, go to the E2G's github and click on releases:

https://github.com/e2guardian/e2guardian/releases

On that page the top release should be the stable one, but check the message associated with it. At the time of this howto latest stable is 3.5.0. You can also directly access the latest release by using this link:

https://github.com/e2guardian/e2guardian/releases/latest

In the Downloads section you'll see a deb, click on it to download or copy the link and use wget to download it to your destination server such as:

wget https://github.com/e2guardian/e2guardian/releases/download/v3.5.0/e2guardian_3.5.0_jessie_amd64.deb

Installing E2Guardian

On the server where you want to install E2G, open a terminal, cd to the directory where you downloaded the package and run the following command:

sudo dpkg -i <package-name>

At this point you may get an error for unmet dependencies, that's fine, just run the following:

sudo apt-get -f install

This will pull in the needed dependencies and complete the E2G installation. At this point if you run ps aux you should see about 20 e2guardian processes (that's expected, by default that's how many children are instantiated)

Installing your proxy

Like previously mentioned E2G needs a proxy to actually fetch the web pages. The most common one is squid, recommended for large/full blown installation, while tinyproxy is proably ideal for small setups and small boxes or virtual machines with less than 2GBs of ram.

To install squid simply run:

sudo apt-get install squid

At this point if you run ps aux you shuold see squid running and you're basically done.

Tinyproxy

If you decide to go with tinyproxy there's an extra step. First off get that installed by doing:

sudo apt-get install tinyproxy

then you need to change the default port tinyproxy listens on to match what's in E2G's default configuration. E2G expects to talk to the proxy on potr 3128, which is what squid defaults on, but tinyproxy by default works on port 8888.

To fix this edit /etc/tinyproxy.conf, find port 8888 and change it to port 3128 and restart tinyproxy by doing sudo /etc/init.d/tinyproxy restart

That's it.

Using your new shiny content filter

To put E2G to use the last step is to reconfigure your browser. How to define a proxy for whatever browser you use is outside of scope of this doc, but here's two guides for Chrome and Firefox, feel free to google for others:

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