What to do with a Bloxx TVT-500?

[Zoom7000]

We are currently running a Bloxx TVT-500 unit that we may soon have no use for if we decide to go with SmoothWall Network Guardian.

Are we able to format the unit and use it for other purposes?

The specs are not that great. Can I upgrade the components? Details of the spec can be found here.

[openhgs]

Check your licence agreement before you do anything; you may not own the hardware. If you do, it's only a rack mounted box so you can chuck in anything compatible. When we upgraded from the CF-250 to TVT-250 the Bloxx man simply dropped a new hard disk in, restored our config and we were good to go.

[bigtime5001]

as prevously stated check you own the equipment. If you do you will find its a standard rackmount server, If I remember correctly they had intel motherboards and standard sata hdd inside. There was another motherboard they used to use aswell but the manufacturer name escapes me at the moment.

I used to build these units for the company who supply bloxx (shock horror they dont build them themselves) .

Anyway hope that helps If I ca help with anything else just shout

[Zoom7000]

Yes, I have received confirmation from Bloxx that we own the TVT-500, we brought it outright for around £5000!

[FN-GM]

we brought it outright for around £5000

wow

[Zoom7000]

Actually make that nearly £6000. It was a time when our I-Gear server was falling over big time, I spent 2 hours on the phone to Symantec operators just waiting for someone to actually recognise the fact that I-Gear is a Symantec product. Finally got a call back from someone asking how he can help with our problem with Symantec Web Security. I told him we were still using I-Gear only to be told I-Gear had been dead for 4 years, yet Pugh Computing still to this day offer licenses! Symantec Support told us to upgrade to SWS, but Symantec Licensing were saying we can't because I-Gear is still current. Yet support said all the ex I-Gear staff had left and there was only 1 guy left who had been working with SWS for nearly 2 years. Anyway, we lost patience with Symantec and needed filtering badly, just when my boss received a call from Bloxx... How convinient. We didn't have any filtering and were desperate, so he took it.

It all started off hunky dory, yet the problems have been flying in and simply put, because we can't replicate them when we call support, we aren't getting anywhere. I understand that it's not entirely Bloxx's fault that we can't replicate the problems when we to call them, but well, it getting annoying when users get a pop up box asking to authenticate to the Bloxx server when it should be doing that automatically via LDAP. Also, I would like to see exactly who does the filtering updates and also how this Tru-View business really works because, kids are getting on to blocked websites willy nilly at times and with proxy avoidance being such a common tool, I have seen entirely lists of web pages in kids My Documents that are not blocked by Bloxx even when they should be. It does work well at times, but seems to let sites through too often for my liking.

Anyway, met Tom Newton from Smoothwall at InfoSec in April and have been trialling Network Guardian for a while now. However, we got shafted by the "You cannot cancel unless you give us 3 months notice" clause in the Bloxx contract so we're lumbered with it for another year, add to this that our Resource Manager is not too happy we spent nearly £6k on a product that is not working too well. Why the hell you would need 3 months notice to simply cancel a contract and not do anything much else is beyond me!

Anyway, I'm trying to get Network Guardian working via Virtualisation so that it can support both our domains as it only supports 1 domain at the moment. Interestingly enough Bloxx does support multiple domains. However, we've been offered the choice to run an additional NG for free if we virtualise it, so hopefully if all else works, I can get the Resource Manager to agree to let us buy it - All this before RM come marching in at the end of October!