Remove advertisments from Untangle Web Filter
If you are running Untangle's free "Lite" package, you may have noticed that advertisements are now shown in the bottom of block pages generated by the Web filter.
Untangle announced that they had put this in place in order to generate revenue to support development of the Untangle platform. Whilst I understand their need to support development, some of the ad's that show up are of a questionable nature. If Untangle has to show advertisements within its block pages in order to support its back end infrastructure then I fear they may not be around much longer, as a company. I'd suggest Untangle look for sponsors to provide update and download hosting for the open source / Lite applications and only host their commercial applications themselves.
Solutions:
1. Purchase an application from Untangle, for example the Branding Manager which costs $108.00 per year. This will automatically remove ad's in the Web Filter application and also lets you brand the interface with your own logo etc. This is my recommended method.
2. If your running a test UTM or a small installation at home, you can forcefully remove the advertisements as follows:
a. SSH into your Untangle box.
b. Make a backup copy of the blockpage:
$ cp /usr/share/untangle/web/blockpage/blockpage_template.jspx /usr/share/untangle/web/blockpage/blockpage_template.jspx~
c. Open the block page template:
nTOP on Untangle 6.2
I've had several people email me regarding information on configuring nTop on Untangle version 6.x (0,1,2).
nTop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular "top" Linux command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well.
nTop users can use a a web browser (e.g. Firefox) to browse through ntop (that acts as a web server) traffic information and get a dump of the network status. In the latter case, ntop can be seen as a simple RMON-like agent with an embedded web interface. The use of:
- a web interface
- limited configuration and administration via the web interface
- reduced CPU and memory usage (they vary according to network size and traffic)
make ntop easy to use and suitable for monitoring various kind of networks.
In an effort to encourage use of the Untangle forums, I've posted a online how to at: http://forums.untangle.com. Please post comments and feedback on the Untangle thread.