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I am totally newbie to Servers. I'm running a small web based office with having 25 employees. It's been 3 months & i'm watching that my team is sucking up all my internet data in downloading,surfing, updating mobile Apps via WiFi, watching videos etc etc. But, now i'll not sit like a fool & watching all this.

Network Infrastructure :-

I'm having 18 Desktops which are connected via LANcables through a Switch/Hub & than one cable from Switch to my Broadband WiFi modem+router. Likewise ,7 Laptops (that are using WiFi's). I used one spare desktop (having 2 Network Cards) & installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 (after do some goggling).All worked well, like i pluged one LAN cable from Router to Internal network card & than one cable from External network card to the Switch. It is obvious that by doing only this i'll not got what i'm looking for.

What i want :-

1) Need to stop downloading mp3's, videos. 2) Block some sites like, social, porn, torrents etc etc. 3) Stop employees cell phones from using WiFi. 4) Manage all files from server only. 5) Maintaing internet speed.

So, how can i do all those above things, means which proxy server or anything like that to install & how to configure all that ?? . I need full tutorials/links/steps right from starting to end.

Could you please help me out so that i can save some bucks :). Kindly provide me with positive answers.

Thanks in advance & thank you so much to AskUbuntu Community.

1 Answer 1

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1&2) You should probably look into a firewall instead. With that, you can just shut off access to various sites. One easy-to-use solution that could run on your spare desktop is untangle http://www.untangle.com. Untangle can also block mimetypes i.e. mp3. You can block .torrent files but actual torrenting apps are more difficult.

If you would like to use the server box with ubuntu as a firewall, you need to do a bit more manual setup. There is a good intro here https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/firewall.html

3) Some wifi routers can filter on MAC address. If this is the case for you, you can just enter the MAC of all your trusted PCs/devices. Although iptables/ufw have MAC filtering it will likely not work from behind the wireless router. That's why you need it in the router itself.

4) Not sure what you mean by this - if you mean web serving via the server, then you can use Squid web proxy on your ubuntu server. You can automatically route web traffic through Squid using this setup on ubuntu. I am only allowed 2 links in my answer so google for "ufw squid transparent" or "iptables squid transparent". I prefer iptables, personally, but ufw is what Ubuntu uses normally.

If you want to use the server as a central filestore you can configure 'cifs' in ubuntu. I am not sure how that relates to/helps your other problems, though.

5) For this, you want "Quality of Service" rules. Untangle can do this. For Ubuntu, look for an app called wondershaper. QoS will let you cap the bandwidth each machine is using so if someone is abusing your network, you only lose 10% performance (or however you've set it up).

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