Broadband connection: RBC NAT versus Public IP addresses

[NetworkGeezer]

What do you do at your school?

Do you prefer the control (and added headaches) of having public IP addresses or do you let the ISP have the bother of looking after the firewall?

[j17sparky]

Unfortunatly we have RBC which comes with the headaches of service down, email and cache/filtering proxy are crap, etc


Would love the "headache" of a public IP.

[alonebfg]

we have a rm service called swgfl they deal with ll of that for us so i cant be any help our ip address is not a puplic one.

[Midget]

same as sparky here

[NetworkGeezer]

we have a rm service called swgfl they deal with ll of that for us so i cant be any help our ip address is not a puplic one.

That's fine all I was trying to see was what people had in place and the pros and cons.

It'll be god to have the opinions of opel who implement Websense or DansGuardian on site to see what they do.

[Slartibartfast]

We pay an obscene amount of money (over 26000) for a crippled RBC broadband connection. No public IPs, and a variety of restrictive practices by the LEA make even simple tasks difficult.

[tobyhughes]

whats RBC

[NetworkGeezer]

RBC= Regional Broadband Consortium

Each consortium is made of a group of local education authorities who banned together to buy broadband services from an ISP for their schools.

You can recognise them by the fact their names tend to be of the form xGfL where x = region name.

I supposed I used RBC generically to refer to indirectly purchased broadband.

[PiqueABoo]

added headaches

You get headaches either way.. the respective magnitudes depend on your competence versus theirs.. s'no generic answer for that.

I imagine genuinely competent people will suffer in consortiums. It's difficult for large organisation to deal with exceptions and they often end up taking away choices that their average "customer" can't handle.

[indie]

Unfortunatly we have RBC which comes with the headaches of service down, email and cache/filtering proxy are crap, etc


Would love the "headache" of a public IP.

Northern Grid by any chance?

[CyberNerd]

we have best and worst of both worlds.
RBC dishes out RFC1918's, then we firewall and NAT again onto another network. So basically we pay for the rubbish RBC connection/ useless proxy and a load of other services we don't use (SMT won't change this). but we also get the 'headaches' of being in control of the network - which does have some advantages

[Ric_]

A quick search should throw up more through discussions of this topic.

Personally, I use a RBC connection (CLEO in Lancashire) - one which I believe is one of the better ones. With RBC connections, you often get added goodies thrown in, like DNS and web hosting, VLE, mail, content filtering and access to NEN (National Education Network) to name but a few.

You really need to weigh up the pros and cons of each before choosing one way or the other... price or external IPs isn't really a good guage. You need to be able to show good value, reliability, security and protection for the little darlings.

As I said above... search for the site for further details.

[DMcCoy]

We use the Segfl.

Its rubbish. I have had a number of 24+ hour down times this year. Email delayed in a queue for OVER 30 days! Email is always delayed and I no longer trust it.

I am not allowed smtp, bit torrent (linux iso), ICMP or any other interesting services.

Recently all my external requests were given the ip of one of their routers, and were therefore blocked by the firewall rules. After that some dns requests to my isp (and other) dns servers started returning the internal RM ip addreses (10.20 etc). Content filtering is from the stone age and has not changed in 5 years.

I have no control, and would love to have a public iip address and my own firewall sat in front of it.

[Nij.UK]

I use EMBC (East Midlands - Leicester) and we get all the things that Ric said...

The only problem is that the quality of the serivce is quite poor, but i think we pay around 9000pa... so its not as expensive as what some are paying!

[NetworkGeezer]

A quick search should throw up more through discussions of this topic.

Yes I have read the previous thread on people thinking of leaving their RBC/LA provision altogether and going it alone e.g. via ADSL.

My question was more about people in CyberNerd's situation where they are incharge of firewall and other services but still have the RBC as their ISP or do most people just except the NAT provided by the RBC.

Interesting reponses none the less.