Record the websites that are accessed

SWS?

Bulk import is dead easy and so is backup.

The issues I have is that it is not regularily updated and you get quite poor assistance if it does go wrong.

When it was I-Gear from URLabs it was a nifty little product, but since nearly all of the original staff from URLabs have now left Symantec then it has gone downhill.

Unofficially it will be discontinued in its present form shortly ... there are no longer any major developments going on with it, and the URL lists are actually just based on those they use for Norton Internet Security ... they get more money from the home market than they do from schools / colleges / businesses.

We are looking at replacements too ... and thought about ISA and surfcontrol. Although we are moving onto the RBC shortly we will be pretty much unfiltered and will still need to run our own stuff.

Going a whole step further we are looking into audit and filtering systems for school level use here in Brimingham. The best of breed that we have found so far is from netintelligence. It allows you to track by login what your users are doing and where they are going right down to what applications they are using and when.

http://www.netintelligence.com/solutions_education.htm

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Originally Posted by GrumbleDook

SWS?

Bulk import is dead easy and so is backup.

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Really? We have SWS 3.0.x, and the NGFL create the LDAP users. We then have to put them into SWS, and it's a painful 1 by one process...we've looked, and the NGFL looked, and couldn't find it?

Mind you..thats not saying much.heh.

I agree with the support etc. We've also had issues where kids have had to be removed and re-entered for their filtering to become effective-SWS sometimes just seems to get a mental block.

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Originally Posted by eduabncs

Going a whole step further we are looking into audit and filtering systems for school level use here in Brimingham. The best of breed that we have found so far is from netintelligence. It allows you to track by login what your users are doing and where they are going right down to what applications they are using and when.

http://www.netintelligence.com/solutions_education.htm

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So what's it like then? ...and how much does it cost! :)

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Originally Posted by mark

Quote:

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Originally Posted by eduabncs

Going a whole step further we are looking into audit and filtering systems for school level use here in Brimingham. The best of breed that we have found so far is from netintelligence. It allows you to track by login what your users are doing and where they are going right down to what applications they are using and when.

http://www.netintelligence.com/solutions_education.htm

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So what's it like then? ...and how much does it cost! :)

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Everbody we show it too loves it. What they have been wanting for years...!

We have got the company to about £25 per seat, but were pushing them for lower, were aiming for around £10 -15 per seat.

But the cost really comes down to being about volume in the end. If we get it cheap enough most schools will buy it, espeacially if they can understand and see the benifits and the cost is right.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by eduabncs

Going a whole step further we are looking into audit and filtering systems for school level use here in Brimingham. The best of breed that we have found so far is from netintelligence. It allows you to track by login what your users are doing and where they are going right down to what applications they are using and when.

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Can't be worse than Policy Central :P Pity I couldn't help trial this one too - it looks a lot better :)

Thanks for that eduabncs - would be nice to show ppl here too - at the price point seems good.

Gents,

We have a local firewall (BizGuardian) and use Kiwi Syslog Daemon (free) to capture and analyse the log files. We have tried to put together a spreadsheet to futher analyse the log files but it gets very large (40000 lines plus!). This works but you have to be prepared to do a lot of searching. KIWI also provide a free logfile viewer.

I used ISA 2000 at my last job and found it far too bulky for what we needed so when I started at my present job I was happy that I had a blank canvas..... I wasn't happy that no logging or filtering seemed to be in placce except for the ISP's blocking.

I tried ISA 2004 as we have a schools agreement but it didn't like talking to our upstream proxy and the £££ of a 3rd party add on put me off. Surfcontrol may be good but I ain't a couple fo grand a year on just that.

I'd played with Smoothwall before but was put off it because of the penguin stuff which I had very little knowledge of. The school wasn't preapred to pay too much so I thought I would suck it and see. Six months later I have a modded Smoothwall with a great GUI for administration, it records all usernames using IDENT so I know what everyone is doing, the blocking is superb and the logs are really easy to use. I recently installed the full firewall control so I can port block easier and the IFTOP utility so I can see the traffic in real time.

The only drawback I have is that I still don't feel comfortable when stuff goes wrong but Smoothwall.org is really useful.

I think we will be going for the corporate version at Smoothwall.net next budget for the added support which we were quoted around about £1000 with 15% annual support thereafter.

Can't recommend it enough.

Any one tried Impero? It's on the wiki but no reference to it on the forums.

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Originally Posted by NetworkGeezer

Any one tried Impero? It's on the wiki but no reference to it on the forums.

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People have looked at it in the past and there are mentions in other posts. IIRC most people found it a bit 'Mickey Mouse' and offer other suggestions to help you save a bit of cash or do the job better ;)

We use ISA Server 2000 which routes to a couple of upstream proxies at the LEA. All internet traffic goes through the ISA and its all logged. We then use Webspy Analyser to parse the logs and present them in pretty graphs and suchlike.

We rely on the LEA to do most of our filtering (They use Dansguardian and do a good job although it can be too restrictive sometimes) and just use standard ISA rules to do any extra filtering. It works, ISA Server was a lot cheaper back then and its completely reliable :)

Nice setup but doesn't the local proxy+firewall and LEA/Count proxy+firewall lead to a slower internet connection?

Not noticably so, no. Latency is a bit higher than what you'd get with a direct internet connection but being as no-ones gaming or running Skype I don't think it matters.

In any case, it's absolutely necessary. The Beds network has been infected with viruses on more than one occasion and without the firewall we're completely vulnerable to them. They got hit by Sasser a while back and a lot of schools were infected by that (Lower schools generally). We also got hit by Blaster when it came out which was before we had ISA in place and also during the school holidays when I was still contracted to work termtime only. It took me more than two weeks to clean the network and we got booted off the Beds network on three seperate occasions :( Lets just say, I got SUS, a working version of a virus scanner and ISA going pretty damn quickly after that little incident.

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Originally Posted by NetworkGeezer

Nice setup but doesn't the local proxy+firewall and LEA/Count proxy+firewall lead to a slower internet connection?

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In theory, the pages that are accessed most will be cached so it should lead to a perception of a quicker connection if anything.