stgoodyeara Posted January 20, 2014 Posted January 20, 2014 You're all probably aware of mymaths and its incompatability with apple devices. I noticed on the mymaths website a news article anouncing "mymath now available via puffin academy browser." So Installed puffin academy on my ipad calculated the regex required to allow traffic to the ip's, turned off https inspection to these location and opened the appropriate ports (54, 80, 443 <-- according to the puffin faqs.) Puffin now passes the network tests but as soon as it establishes a conenction if just crashes out. If i tether my ipad to my mobile it works fine. Has anyone else got puffin academy working via the smoothwall?
TechSupp Posted January 20, 2014 Posted January 20, 2014 Interesting as we also have had issues with MyMaths not running on android tablets. I saw the info about Puiffin Acaemy I think it was on the Education City site. Have got it loaded up in Meraki to install but yet to try it.
stgoodyeara Posted January 20, 2014 Author Posted January 20, 2014 The Distribution of the app is fine, and i've tested it on a standard connection. Unfortunatly when i try to use it via smoothwall based internet connection the app just dies as it connects. Next time i open the app it want to send an error report. I have also tested Photon browser, this does achieve mymath on the smoothwalled internet connection but it uses a HTTPS proxy as to connect to a flash proxy so they achieve unfliter internet connections which i cant allow.
tom_newton Posted January 20, 2014 Posted January 20, 2014 You might find it needs adding to the "SNI allow list" as it does a bit of unpleasant tunnelling. My advice: avoid puffin, as it is unfilterable, and their developers have been very unhelpful when contacting them about making it easier to allow their product.
stgoodyeara Posted January 20, 2014 Author Posted January 20, 2014 Tom, in principle I agree with you. But the puffin academic app goes some way to resolving the unfiltered issue. There is only a selection of allowed white listed sites. It fits the bill perfectly to get mymaths on Apple products. Remind me how to sni it? IP ranges are - 216.218.220.0/27 - 216.218.223.32/27
Simcfc73 Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 *bump* Did you get an answer how to add these to the SNI, I can see the category but its a set one isn't it?
synaesthesia Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 This is the same Puffin browser used by people worldwide to bypass certain systems, allow hacked plugins etc to be used on devices that wouldn't otherwise support it? Really wise to use it in an educational establishment? It's handy for the odd Flash thing on your iProduct or modern Android but still...
stgoodyeara Posted January 27, 2014 Author Posted January 27, 2014 The academic version only allows access to a small handful of educational whitelisted sites. I looked through some old notes and found the SNI allow category. Calculated the a regex for the URL stings and put them in as a URL Pattern. It still doesn't work. In the Web filter its trying to load a page https://*.flashbrowser.com and giving a 503 error. Why its looking for a wild carded URL is beyond me.
synaesthesia Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Interesting, will keep an eye on that then. Cheers
abillybob Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 My Maths works perfectly fine on my Android phone, I have the flash player app installed if this makes a difference???
Djm1983 Posted March 12, 2014 Posted March 12, 2014 Hi All, I have been working on this problem for a few days now and still have no answers. I did manage to contact the developer and this is what they are saying; "Puffin Academy uses TLS to secure connection between Puffin and our data center. In this case, it needs to connect to your HTTPS proxy server first in order to connect our data center. For uncertain reasons, our protocol layer can not work with that proxy server. It reported the SSL handshake via your proxy server is failed (bad certificate). One possible reason is your filtering system (Smoothwall) actually replaced the certificate and become a man-in-middle to filter content in a secure connection. And that cause Puffin failed to connect our servers. It's definitely a bug that our network diagnostics process didn't find out this issue. But I'm afraid that this issue can't be fixed soon (or can't be fixed anyway?) I would like to thank you again for providing us these information. I will update you if we find a way to work with Smoothwall filtering system."
grant_girdwood Posted March 14, 2014 Posted March 14, 2014 Just as an aside I've been playing around with both apps morning and can see that the Puffin Browser & Puffin Academy App connect to the same servers, so be careful when attempting to allow the servers for Puffin Academy as you may inadvertently allow the Puffin Browser app which I'm sure nobody wants to do
Darylrese Posted December 8, 2014 Posted December 8, 2014 Did anyone get this working? My maths department would like to use Puffin Academy app but everything is blocked at the moment. Regards
TechBeard Posted January 23, 2015 Posted January 23, 2015 my maths team is breathing down my neck for this. Why MyMaths haven't updated their site yet inline with pretty much every other educational software provider I don't know!
Darylrese Posted January 23, 2015 Posted January 23, 2015 (edited) I spoke to someone from second line support at smoothwall and he managed to get it all working. I'd log a call with them to find out how its done. Regards Edited January 23, 2015 by Darylrese
TechBeard Posted January 23, 2015 Posted January 23, 2015 Unfortunately we have had a call open for a while with Smoothwall. Smoothwall say its our ISP (Essex county council) but when I bypass the smoothwall and go straight to the upstream it works fine. Raised a ticket with the ISP anyway today so we shall see!
ass17 Posted January 24, 2015 Posted January 24, 2015 We have it working, we had to SSH into smoothwall and take a look at the raw live outgoings to find that it uses a few IP addresses that you need to add to smoothy. I'll take a look on Monday what we have done and post back.
TechBeard Posted January 30, 2015 Posted January 30, 2015 We have it working, we had to SSH into smoothwall and take a look at the raw live outgoings to find that it uses a few IP addresses that you need to add to smoothy. I'll take a look on Monday what we have done and post back. Hi, Did you have a chance to see what they did?
maniac Posted February 5, 2015 Posted February 5, 2015 It appears to work on the KPSN in kent absolutely fine. We only discovered this existed the other day and our maths department are dead pleased they might finally be able to use my maths on the iPads we have. We are conducting some more thorough testing at the moment :-)
bezzoh Posted April 8, 2015 Posted April 8, 2015 I keep having connection failures with Puffin Academy app on iPad, caused it seems by the use of a number of web servers that are being identified by Smoothwall as web proxies. My only resolution was to set the entire 107.178.44.0/24 subnet as a proxy exception.
simpsonj Posted September 22, 2016 Posted September 22, 2016 Sorry to Necro an old thread, but was there a 'Smoothwall' sanctioned method to get Puffin Academy running on iPads? Maths dept. want to use Mangahigh, though I'm not even sure if that's part of the Puffin Academy list of sites...
TechBeard Posted September 26, 2016 Posted September 26, 2016 Sorry to Necro an old thread, but was there a 'Smoothwall' sanctioned method to get Puffin Academy running on iPads? Maths dept. want to use Mangahigh, though I'm not even sure if that's part of the Puffin Academy list of sites... In the end we found it was a problem with our upstream proxy with our Essex County Council internet feed. As soon as i got the head teacher to write a letter saying we wanted to bypass that, because we wanted to use our own filter system (Smoothwall) it just worked like a treat. 1
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