How to remove Dan's Guardian from an Eee PC?
February 18, 2010 8:38 AM   Subscribe

How do I remove Dan's Guardian from an Asus Eee PC 900 Netbook? (Complications inside.)

Okay, my mother has an Asus Eee PC 900 Netbook off of woot.com, and it has some horrid piece of parental control software enabled on it called "Dan's Guardian" which is keeping her off of Facebook and her blog.

I googled a fix and tried to talk her through it last night. She lives in Washington state, and I'm in Illinois, so looking at it myself is highly impractical.

Anyway, according to the woot forum, you're supposed to open a console window and type in the following two commands:
cd /etc/dansguardian
sudo nano dansguardianf1.conf

Then find the line that says:
groupmode = 1
change that to a "2" and save.
Reboot the eeepc and dansguardian loses functionality.

That sounded pretty straightforward, so I thought I could get her through it. (I used to work at a help desk - unfortunately, for Windows.)

After the requisite trouble, she finally did get the .conf file open and said she changed the groupmode entry. The file itself contained information that she read to me indicating that this was, indeed, the correct course of action to enable unfiltered surfing. (Apparently it's some sort of simple toggle - 1 for filtered, 2 for unfiltered.)

However, I had some trouble getting her through saving the file, so I wasn't sure we got anything done at all. (I had to get to bed - this took a while.)

Apparently, she was successful in changing the file, though, because this morning all she can get into is gmail.

I had her check and there are backup files in the directory for the file in question. However, I don't know, offhand, how to delete the file that is now messed up and replace it with one of them.

I'm going to go ahead and see about paying a friend to do the rest of this, rather than try to talk her through it again. Unfortunately, he's also a Windows guy, no Linux experience, so I want to have directions in hand for him.

Little help, anybody? I'm interested in any solution that will result in her getting online without filtering - removing the filtering software completely, restoring a backup conf file so I can have it edited correctly...um, any other workable option I might not have thought of would be fine, too.
posted by mordax to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
Best answer: The save command in nano is Ctrl-O (for WriteOut).

cd /etc/dansguardian

delete the file:
rm dansguardianf1.conf

use a backup file
cp dansguardianf1.conf

rm = remove
cp = copy

Hope this helps.

posted by contrarian at 8:46 AM on February 18, 2010


Best answer: No need to muck with the conf file if you just want to remove the filtering completely, just "sudo apt-get remove dansguardian"
posted by robokevin at 9:30 AM on February 18, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. :)
posted by mordax at 9:43 AM on February 18, 2010


« Older How is babby entertained?   |   Which Parks? Shower Etiquette? Camping Ideas? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.