smoothwall filtering problems

Hi Tom.... or Whoever beats him to post.. lol

Our students are searching on wikipedia for William Shakesphere. but is being blocked because of phrases.... it's picking up xxxvi in Roman numerals and then blocking it.. what can i do to get round it?...

Also having the same problem with bbc.co.uk/history....

Another thing, our technology department want us to allow glassgiant.com to the students as it has some useful things for them apparently, but it also has games. Can i block just the games on the site and allow the rest?

They seem to all be under Free Games!...

Cheers,

Michael

RE the just blocking one part, put on the custom block list put glassgiant.com/games on the list and then put glassgiant.com on the allow list so that will allow the rest but block anything that trails with /games at the end of it and I have tested that here and it works.

I am not having those problems with the BBC or the good Sir Will on my settings, you may have something turned on that I haven't got perhaps

Hi John,

Many Thanks, That's what I tried previously and have just tried again. but it still allows them...

I checked the realtime logs and it said exception site match...

anything else i'm overlooking??

Regards,

Michael

Can you post a few example URLs that are being overblocked?

Glassgiant is an interesting one. Some of the bits *not* under /games are a bit gamey, so I don't think I will remove it from the games blocklist (I could replace it with the /games URL... any opinions?) so your best bet is to whitelist the bits your staff want to access - if you whitelist the whole site you will then be unable to blacklist any portion of it, as whitelist takes precedence over black, IYSWIM!

Hi Tom,

Many thanks for your input....

We're also having a problem with bbc.co.uk - DENIED Weighted phrase limit of 100 : 371...

What are other people using as a phrase limit?... Students here are set 100 and staff 200..

Regards,

Michael

Michael: have you disabled the "good content" rules by any chance?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tom_newton

Michael: have you disabled the "good content" rules by any chance?

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Was just about to suggest that as with that weighting it must be missing them!

Tom,

That must be the problem.... I must have deleted the "good content" rules... any way i can restore them? without losing all the others...

Michael

Have you still got the "Reduce Overblocking" filter in "filters"? If so, add an "Allow" rule for "All" to that filter. If not, drop me an email and I will send instructions.

for future reference for anyone else, the reduce over blocking was not on...

Hopefully its now fixed the problems...

Cheers once again Tom.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by linkazoid

Hi Tom,

Many thanks for your input....

We're also having a problem with bbc.co.uk - DENIED Weighted phrase limit of 100 : 371...

What are other people using as a phrase limit?... Students here are set 100 and staff 200..

Regards,

Michael

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We have been using SmoothWall since the start of this month and our users are struggling with the weighted Phrases. Have set Staff at 500 and Pupils at 160.

Staff now seems to be ok, but Pupils still seem to be having problems, especialy with google image searches, googling Olympic Games seems to trigger it (see below) good content rule is enabled, any suggestions apart from raising the limit?

Google Images 253 Warning Forbidden (403)
modified (URL) *DENIED* Weighted phrase limit of 160 : 253 ((-news, report)+(-article, news)+(-interview, news)+(-control, gun)+(-aids, cure, hiv)+(-aids, i...

Also have the problem with UCAS certificate and jsut installed the CA sent over and rebooted the proxy, but still does not like the UCAS site. :confused:

Drew, give us a call on monday and we'll take a look at your logs and work on the overblocks.

I think Stuart_C knows the answer to the UCAS one - something to do with a crl site that doesn't like NTLM. He tried to PM me details but my inbox was full (doh). Should be a simple one to solve tho.

Ture to both points.
I've posted the URL's in the Smoothwall direct support forum. Just about to see if Tom's freed up his inbox :)

Just tried the UCAS site this morning and it seems to now be working. Not sure why it did not work on Friday after I installed the CAs and restarted the Proxy, it might have had that Friday feeling like me ;)

Can you give me any suggestions about weighted phrases, other than our users adjusting to the new filtering system? Does the weighted phrases link in to the Bad language (non-English) filter category?

Yes it does - i'd avoid using the bad language (non english) cats - they're a bit hit & miss, we are phasing them out in favour of including non-english stuff in the regular lists - they are only really there for "back compatibility".