Cleo NED Box AD Integration

[TomTomGo]

I've managed to link our NED box with the school 2k3 domain so we can use the logging facilities to monitor users browsing.

Firstly, on a domain client (Windows XP, IE8) using the wwwcache proxy configuration it takes upto a minute to load the users homepage, sometimes longer. Is anyone else experiencing slow authentication with their NEDs? Do you use the AD integration?

Secondly, how are people analysing the logs generated by the NED? I can view the logs via the dashboard web interface, yet when i try to download them I get corrupted .bz2 files! Trying to import them into Sawmill to hopefully analyse.

Hope someone can shed some light.

[SimpleSi]

Is anyone else experiencing slow authentication with their NEDs?

Using the wwwcache cleo settings seems to be alright in my schools - never thought to try to blame it for 1st page loading times

Don't so any authentication - I don't use domains.


regards

Simon

[dobedobedoh]

Secondly, how are people analysing the logs generated by the NED? I can
view the logs via the dashboard web interface, yet when i try to download
them I get corrupted .bz2 files! Trying to import them into Sawmill to
hopefully analyse.

The log file download facility actually bunzip2s the logs on the fly and
delivers you a plain text file so they're not really corrupt - they're just
not bz2 and we weren't removing the extension.

I should probably point out that this is really an issue with Windows and
the way it disregards MIME types in favour of extensions.

I've modified the Dashboard NED logging pages to adjust the file name upon
download so these logs shouldn't be appearing as .bz2s any more.

Andrew

[Cache]

I found when playing with mine if I got an access denied page I had to close the browser down and load it back up to start browsing again, but haven't had time to look in more detail at it yet.

[soveryapt]

I tried to get mine to integrate, however everytime a user goes to go on the internet, they are being asked for their username and password again, which is just annoying .. so went back to how it was ..

the wwwcache settings seem to work fine though. You will find complaints from me earlier when they were first introduced about how slow it all seemed, but they seem to of ironed out some bugs and it works fine now.

[dobedobedoh]

I tried to get mine to integrate, however everytime a user goes to go on the internet, they are being asked for their username and password again, which is just annoying .. so went back to how it was ..

Users should not be asked for their username and password more than once. If using a browser which sends the NTLM authentication, then they shouldn't be asked at all. IIRC, Firefox doesn't pass through the NTLM auth from the Operating System and so users will be asked once for their username and password.

You will find complaints from me earlier when they were first introduced about how slow it all seemed, but they seem to of ironed out some bugs and it works fine now.

If memory serves, this initial slowness was not actually caused by the NED itself, but a mis-configuration of a firewall in the core which was dropping connections instead of allowing them through. This caused the caching software to wait until the connection timed out before returning.
Since most browsers are configured to only allow 4 connections to any one proxy server, this affects the whole browsing experience.

[soveryapt]

Users should not be asked for their username and password more than once. If using a browser which sends the NTLM authentication, then they shouldn't be asked at all. IIRC, Firefox doesn't pass through the NTLM auth from the Operating System and so users will be asked once for their username and password.

Aye, but the problem is that a lot of the kids at this particular school need their info putting in for them (Specialist School) but IE7 (and since upgrading 8) ask for the details so I gave up.

If anyone has any suggestions on if this should and (if so) how I can get it to work without asking, please do post them!

[Geoff]

Also consider, some combinations of browser and OS will prefer Kerberos Authentication over NTLM. I suspect this is just 2k8/Vista/Win7/IE8 clients, but I could be wrong. I doubt the NED has Kerberos Squid Auth setup, as it's a Squid 3.0 feature.