NxFilter Tutorial

Other things about NxCloud
NxCloud is developed based on NxFilter and inherited most of the features of NxFilter. We also added many new features only available on NxCloud to satisfy cloud filtering providers.


License policy for operators
You may want to send warning emails to your operators before their license expire or you may want to set default value for the number of users and policies for your operators to create. You can do such things on 'Operator > License Policy'.


License violation by operators
You can restrict the maximum number of users for your operators or customers by setting 'Max User' value on operator edit page. When an operator has more users than the number you set, you want to alert them about their license violation. NxCloud can send email alert to the operators who violated license and you also can bypass filtering for them. You can set how it acts on 'Operator > License Policy > On License Violation'.
When you use NxRelay, NxCloud can find out the number of users behind a router based on the number of private IPs or Active Directory usernames. If you set it to bypass filtering, the extra users will not be filtered.

Without NxRelay, NxCloud will decide the number of users for an operator based on the number of DNS requests. To find out more, read Business and home accounts


Signup and password reset
You can build your own signup page and other service pages using our API set but we also provide a simple signup page and a password reset form as example JSP pages. In /nxcloud/webapps directory, you can find 'signup.jsp' for signup and 'resetpw.jsp' to reset operator password. You can use them as examples for building your own webpages or use them as they are.

When you use NxCloud signup function, if there's a new customer signup, you get a signup request on 'Operator > Signup Request' for you to approve it. When you approve it, you get a new operator account based on the signup request.

You will get a notification email for a new signup request when you have your alert email set on 'System > Alert'.

If you don't want to go through this approval process and create a new operator account at signup time immediately, you can select 'Create a new operator' option for 'On Signup Request' action on 'Operator > License Policy'. You also can send a welcome email by selecting 'Notification email' option for 'On Signup Approval' action on the menu. The template file for the signup welcome email is /nxfilter/conf/tpl/signup-approval-email.ftl.

You can have a password reset page for your operators. It will send a new password to the email address associated to your username. The template file for the password reset email is /nxfilter/conf/tpl/password-reset-email.ftl.


Trial period for operators
Most cloud filtering providers offer 30 day free trial for their customers. You can have this kind of function with NxCloud. On 'Operator > License Policy', you can enable 'Use Trial Period'. After you enabled this option, when a new operator account created, the new account will be in 30 day trial period.

If you want to finish an operator's trial period manually, you can do it on operator edit page.

When an operator's trial license expires, you will be notified by an email alert if you set your alert email address on 'System > Alert'. And you can decide whether to suspend the account in expired trial license or not. You also can make it suspending the operator accounts in expired trial license automatically on 'License Policy' with the options for 'On Trial Expiration' action.

You can manually suspend or unlock an operator account on its edit page.


Authentication over cloud
NxCloud supports IP based authentication against users behind a router with NxRelay. This means that you can apply different policies based on private IPs and you also can find out the exact number of users behind a router.

With NxRelay, 'Active Directory integration over cloud' is also possible.


Dynamic IP client
Many of your clients will be using your DNS filtering service from dynamic IP addresses. You need a dynamic IP updater for them. We have NxUpdate for that purpose. And some of your clients may have dynamic domains for their network. Your operators can associate these dynamic domains to their users.


Dynamic domain mapping
Some of your clients may have dynamic domains such as DynDNS, NO-IP. They can associate these dynamic domains to their users.


Remote filtering
We provide NxProxy for remote filtering. To find out more, read NxProxy and Remote Filtering


Service expiration date
For NxCloud operators, you can set a service expiration date. Once their service expire, their DNS requests will be bypassed from filtering while they get warning messages on their log view but the DNS resolving will still be working.

If you want to stop DNS resolving for an operator, use 'Suspend' option.


Anycast DNS
You may want to put multiple servers behind two IP addresses like the other cloud filtering providers. You can do that with our clustering feature but you need to know something about block redirection with Anycast. To find out more, read Anycast for block redirection