Ranger Guardian and network monitoring

[steveo2000]

Has anyone on here used Ranger Guardian or a similar product. Im looking to get something like this in school and wanted to know how good it was and if there are alternatives?

What we want to do is monitor what pupils are saying and doing on the network, not to the point of being Big Brother but for security and bullying purposes incase something of this nature is brought to our attention.

Thanks

Steve

[DaveP]

Have you looked at Securus?

Securus

We are having a demo box on-site for a trial period. Might be worth a look?

[DAZZD88]

Have you looked at Securus?

Securus

We are having a demo box on-site for a trial period. Might be worth a look?

I think Ranger Guardian and Securus are now the same thing.

Ranger Guardian/Securus is quite good for monitoring things, as it takes screenshots of the offending language or whatever is set to pick up, so you get to see the context of what is picked up. You can set different things at different severity levels and you can set a limit so that you can accrue so many points worth of offensive content before it alerts you. I haven't had a chance to get fully acquainted with it but it has impressed me a little, which with regards to Ranger is quite a difficult thing to achieve.

[Edu-IT]

We use Securus here and it's amazing what it does pick up, sometimes it's a little too sensitive but after a few tweaks it'll be a great addition to your network. Just have to find time to regularly monitor it.

[Tyiell]

I set up a Squid & DansGuardian filter with a webmin frontend on Ubuntu lately. If you run the smoothwall Idt program on the clients (not sure if its related to the Smoothwall company) which is a freely available Windows wrapper for the Identd deamon it tracks the username, computer name and you can report on all the sites visited (allowed or denied). It's been dead handy for us to track attempts to get onto illegal sites, and to ban internet access as a punishment.

Doesn't track what they are saying on allowed sites however, so not sure if it would help tracking what bullies have said on a site.

And it's all freely available