Primary school Internet Filtering

[Jawloms]

Hi all,

 

I look after a couple of primary schools and one of them has asked me to look in to coming away from their current County Broadband solution. I have never looked in to anything like this before, but thought Smoothwall and Dansguardian rang bells for this sort of thing. Having looked around a bit, everything I can find to do with it looks like it was done about ten years ago! And the documentation I could find looked very poor.

 

Am I in the correct place by looking at these? Am I correct in thinking they're free for education? Is there something better I could use? They currently pay nearly £3.5k pa for a line which gives them about 10mb and very good filtering.

 

Thanks

 

Stuart

[supawat1]

Have a look at untangle.com, you might like the product.

[IrritableTech]

The smootwall express / dans guardian combo is still being used by some I'm sure, however it has been hanging around for some time. They are free, but only have community support and aren't updated very often (if at all?). Smoothwall also make commercial products which do the job much better, and come with support if things go wrong.

 

With the renewed interest by ofsted in esafety (the teaching of online safety) and the continued importance of safeguarding (the school keeping the pupils safe) I'd probably suggest to look at one of the commercially available products on the market. Each have their positives and negatives as well as their differing price tags.

 

I've been looking at Smoothwall, Lightspeed and Bloxx and found the one that best suited our needs.

[Brpilot99]

My 2 primaries now use Censornet after having left the SWGFL .... you can have cloud filtering or if you want it will run on a low spec local machine. I bought a pair of the HP mini servers at £120.00 each. Its linux based with a very nice web front end. Very easy to manage . They are IWF accredited and are a pleasure to talk to ...

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi all,

 

I look after a couple of primary schools and one of them has asked me to look in to coming away from their current County Broadband solution. I have never looked in to anything like this before, but thought Smoothwall and Dansguardian rang bells for this sort of thing. Having looked around a bit, everything I can find to do with it looks like it was done about ten years ago! And the documentation I could find looked very poor.

 

Am I in the correct place by looking at these? Am I correct in thinking they're free for education? Is there something better I could use? They currently pay nearly £3.5k pa for a line which gives them about 10mb and very good filtering.

 

Thanks

 

Stuart

 

 

Hi Stuart,

 

this is something we can do for you including line, Lightspeed filtering, management, Fortinet security, vpn, mobile device management etc etc starting from £2,600pa for our bronze FTTC 40Mbit service.

 

you could get your own filtering and then work with someone like BT or Virgin directly but we find most primary schools like the fully managed service so one point of contact for everything.

 

Cheers

 

Dave

[ConradJones]

you could get your own filtering and then work with someone like BT or Virgin directly but we find most primary schools like the fully managed service so one point of contact for everything.

 

I think dave's got a point there.