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You can not save anything on the ZoneCD. The ZoneCD is a LiveCD, which is a read only environment. Your computer's RAM is used for read-write configurations and services. RAM is cleared when you reboot. If you want something to stay on the ZoneCD you will need to put it in the iso.

An alternative to re-mastering the ZoneCD is using a floppy disk to alter the characteristics of the gateway. In addition to the automatic configuration done by the boot script, you can also do a couple other tricks with the floppy.

  • To execute commands prior to the initialization of the ZoneCD, create file named pre.sh and place it on the floppy inside the created zonecd directory. The zonecd directory is created after you run the initial configuration during the first boot.
  • To execute commands at the end of the boot, create a shell script named init.sh and place it on the floppy inside the created zonecd directory. The zonecd directory is created after you run the initial configuration during the first boot.

Enable SSH access:



Enable un-authenticated access:


NoCat: The ZoneCD uses a NoCat Gateway setup in Passive mode. There are a couple tweaks that alter the behavior of the default nocat gateway. The file initialize.fw has been changed to redirect port 80 traffic to port 8080. This rule enables the transparent proxy needed to enforce content filtering. Also the library file Passive.pm has been tweaked to enable homepage redirection.

All files on the floppy will be copied from the floppy to '/usr/local/nocat' on the ZoneCD. This allows you to alter the characteristics of NoCat. For example, in Open mode the splash page that is served is located in '/usr/local/nocat/htdocs' and the file is named 'spash.html'. Sooo... if you create a directory on the floppy named htdocs and put your own splash.html in it, then it will be copied to the ZoneCD and replace the default splash page. Of course you can add an image directory and add images to your splash page.


Dansguardian: Once NoCat is done doing it's job, it sends the request through the content filter by means of the transparent proxy to port 8080. The content filter will check for bad words, sex stuff, extreme violence, drug references, etc., contained in the web page and the url. Dansguardian also checks the file extension and file size. View the config file for Dansguardian. If it's a dirty request, then the request will be blocked and redirected to a special error page with details of the block. If the request is clean, it will pass through the filter and be sent to squid on port 3128.

Dansguardian can be tweaked by altering the file '/usr/local/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf'. After you make a change to the conf file you must run `/etc/init.d/dansguardian restart`. Once you are satisfied with your tweaks copy the file to the floppy. `cp /usr/local/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf /mnt/floppy/zonecd/conf` will save your changes for the next boot.


Squid: Squid is a proxy server that listens for requests on port 3128. It will cache web pages in memory to save bandwidth. Squid's config has been slightly tweaked to reduce memory demands on your ZoneCD.