[LEDE-DEV] Introducing Charcoal - Centralised URL filter for Squid

[Nishant Sharma]

Hi,

We are excited to invite early users to test drive Charcoal 
(http://charcoal.io) - a Squid URL Rewriter for distributed proxies.

It has come out of our need of managing ACLs for 100+ proxy servers on 
OpenWRT/LEDE running at our customer offices across the geography of 
India. We are releasing it in the hope that it will be useful for users 
who have to manage multiple proxy servers everyday.

Devices that we have tested it on are:

- PCEngines ALIX
- PCEngines APU
- PCEngines APU2
- Mikrotik Routerboard RB951Ui-2HnD

Releases that we have tested it on are:

- OpenWRT 14.07
- OpenWRT 15.05
- LEDE 17.01

Charcoal is designed to help administrators manage access rules for the 
proxies at just one place with a GUI, instead of editing configuration 
of individual proxy servers.

The architecture is API key driven client-server, where a squid 
url-rewrite helper contacts server to query access controls for the 
incoming requests.

Current features:
-----------------
- Supports Squid 2.x and 3.x
- 70+ pre-existing domains blacklist
- Custom destination groups/categories
- Custom source groups for IPs and Networks (usernames in the pipeline)
- As of now only domain filter support (no full url filtering)
- API key driven

Configuration:
--------------
- Download the helper from 
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Hopbox/charcoal-helper/master/squid/charcoal-helper.pl. 

- Make sure IO::Socket (perlbase-io) module for Perl is installed.
- Add following lines to squid.conf after downloading the helper:

url_rewrite_program /path/to/charcoal-helper.pl YOUR_API_KEY
url_rewrite_children X startup=Y idle=Z concurrency=1

YOUR_API_KEY for our hosted Charcoal service can be requested by filling 
in the form at http://charcoal.io or writing in to charcoal at hopbox.in. 
The credentials for login to https://active.charcoal.io to manage the 
ACL will be emailed along with YOUR_API_KEY.

License:
--------
URL Rewrite helper for squid is licensed under GPLv2.0 while Charcoal 
Server is licensed under AGPLv3.0.

GIT Repo:
---------
Squid URL Rewrite helper can be downloaded from 
https://github.com/Hopbox/charcoal-helper

Git repository for Charcoal Server is at https://github.com/Hopbox/charcoal

Regards,
Nishant