Smoothwall & unblock Twitter / site rendering issues

[Luke_T]

Hi all,

 

Had a trawl through the internet but to no avail so time to call your expertise!

 

We use Smoothwall UTM-3000 for internet filtering in our school.

 

By default we block social networking sites for students but the school is slowy relaxing it's filtering and we would like to allow students access to Twitter, wkilst still blocking all other Social Networking sites ...

 

The issues we have are:

 

1. After adding twitter.com to our custom allow list although the site loads for students it doesn't render correctly ... however it does work for staff ...

 

2. Twitter widgets such as those embedded in our VLE do not load for students, whereas they do for staff ...

 

Looking at the logs the widget appears to load from: http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

 

which we have also added to the custom allow list with no effect ...

 

What do I need to do to get the twitter page to render correctly and to allow the widget to be accessed?

 

Thanks a lot!

[JB7]

If you check your managed policies which you can find under your web filter category you may find that you need to re-order some of your Custom Groups.

This may not be the issue for you but it has been a problem in the past for us. Some of the blocked content was in the "Core Blocked Content" group which was higher than our students group so it would block due to the ordering

 

Worth a look to eliminate it ?

[Luke_T]

Thanks for that tip it's actually something we have had trouble before and double checking it was fine was good.

 

We have now managed to resolve the issue by inspecting the page source for other adresses that it calls when loading the page and the widget.

 

twitter.com - site

platform.twitter.com - feed framework

abs.twimg.com - css / layout hosting

 

Thanks.

[AMLinington]

Don't forget that twitter uses a lot of cloud hosting domains like amazonaws.com so simply allowing the twitter domains won't solve this I'm afraid. You have to allow the cloud hosting domains too and I'd be cautious of allowing too specific a domain as the problem with cloud hosting is that you don't always get the same host twice. So allowing s3.amazonaws.com one day might work fine but the next it'll want s4.amazonaws.com etc. So some content - particularly user generated content won't have the hosts listed in the page source.