NxFilter Tutorial

Install NxCloud
You can install and run NxCloud in the same way as NxFilter.


Installing and running
You can install and run NxCloud in the same way as NxFilter because it is basically a modified version of NxFilter. However, unlike NxFilter, after you install it, you can't use it as your DNS server right away. This is because NxCloud is a multi-tenancy program for commercial filtering service. You are not supposed to use it for your internal network. Your customers use it for their network. So, you need to create an account for your customer first.

We have ZIP, EXE, DEB, RPM packages for NxCloud. To find out more, read the part for NxFilter installation.

On NxCloud, there are 3 kinds of users.

Admin > Operator > User

'Admin' is you and an operator is your customer and a user is the user in your customer's network. An admin manages operator accounts and an operator manages the end users and policies. So, you need to create an operator first. To create an operator, login to NxCloud GUI as admin and then go to 'Operator' menu. You can create an operator there.

After you created an operator, there will be a default user and default policy for the operator with the same name as the operator. And the default password for the operator is also the name of the operator. Once you created an operator, you can login to an operator GUI using the operator account to set up a user for testing.

You can associate your IP address to the default user of your first operator to test it.


Differences from running NxFilter
1. Authentication is enabled always
You don't want to make your service available to everybody for free. You want to service it to your customers only. So, the authentication is enabled by default.

2. Login redirection is disabled at default

You can still use password based login with NxCloud. However, if you log in on a public network, you may become a target of DNS attacks, as there could be attackers behind the public IP address from which you logged in. When disabled, NxCloud silently drops any DNS requests from unknown source IP addresses.

3. Magic password for accessing operator GUI

As an administrator of NxCloud, sometimes you need to access an operator GUI. For that, NxCloud has one more password for admin which is called Magic Password. With this password, you can access any operator's GUI. The default magic password is 'magic1023' and you can change it on 'System > Admin'.