Making URLfilter easier on FLASH installations.

[Davesworld]

As a long time user of URLfilter as well as a big fan of Raqcop or IPCop FLASH installations I never liked how the urlfilter definitions update thrashed the flash drive for nearly an hour as it updates the databases for each definition category. This made me think, since the /tmp directory on flash installs is in a ram disk rather than on the physical flash drive and the download and database updates are done in a separate folder than the actual /var/ipcop/urlfilter/blacklists so it made sense to have all the thrashing done in a ramdisk (memory) and then copied to blacklists AFTER all the heavy work was finished.

I found that by editing /var/ipcop/urlfilter/bin/autoupdate.pl line 14 to:

my $target = "/tmp/download";

It takes just under 5 minutes to update the databases and then copy the new blacklists folder to /var/ipcop/urlfilter and you do not see your delicate flash drive being pounded for 45 minutes or so. I now allow mine to autoupdate daily but may back that down to a week or longer depending if I see many changes in the course of a week. I use Shalla Services as my choice.

A while back I did email Marco about using /tmp in IPCop 2 since ALL installations of IPCop 2, flash or disk, mount /tmp using TMPFS so ram would be used for the heavy lifting during definitions updates as I have done with a Raqcop flash install. I believe he is at least considering it but I'm sure there are greater priorities at the moment.