BLOXX Web Filtering

[CPercival]

Could anyone please share their experiences with BLOXX web filtering in a school environment?

 

We are looking at BLOXX as a replacement for our current filter that we have been experiencing issues with and want to hear from existing, or past, BLOXX users to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the filtering system before purchasing it.

 

Thanks!

[jonnykewell1]

@themightymrp uses this

[Marches]

we have bloxx and they've been good, cant comment on price or things like that however its easy to alter filtering , block or allow sites when needed and their support has been very helpful when we have needed it.

 

if you need any specific information I will try and answer any questions you have.

[CPercival]

Thanks for your response! How useful is reporting with BLOXX? Edited April 2, 2014 by CPercival

[themightymrp]

So far, we are loving the Bloxx system! Blocking or unblocking sites is easy, the reporting has been great for the times we've needed it. There are a bunch of useful ready made reports or you can create your own.

 

I have just created some custom filtering policies which only apply to a single subnet which is great. We are on OS version 6 but are being upgraded to 7 next week. This should allow an option of specifying a transparent proxy for certain subnets (I need this for our BYOD plan).

 

Technical support is top notch - the guys actually know what they're doing! Shock horror! lol

[synaesthesia]

How modular can the filtering be? For instance, can it be used to filter to rooms, groups, sets of rooms right down to single users?

Have heard some bad things about BLOXX but haven't seen it in action myself to pass judgement.

[themightymrp]

You could if you wanted to create filtering rules based on groups of users or individuals. We haven't gone the whole hog in that respect, just a separate filtering policy per year group and a special one for a single users login.

 

Not sure about by room? I suppose if you used a separate VLAN per room (which we have) you could specify a different policy for each subnet - kind of how I'm doing for the guest WiFi. Not sure of another way, but that's probably because we don't need it so haven't gone looking for it.

 

What bad things have you heard?

[synaesthesia]

Was a fair while ago regarding reliability and inflexibility if my memory serves me. What you hear isn't always something to go by of course; we heard Fortinet was quite good (it isn't).

 

That's a shame on the room filtering thing; we currently use Impero to do it but it'd be nice to keep filtering related things on the same system for ease. With the old RM Safetynet you could easily allow full flexibility working from individuals to rooms, user or computer and we rather miss that. We like being flexible with staff and it saves us time

[Abaddon]

We've had BLOXX for web filtering for many years. No issues, excellent support. Reporting does everything I need, and policies are easy. Latest update is much better than previous versions as well. Recommended.

[themightymrp]

Well we are upgrading to version 7 of the software next week. Who knows what lovely new features it will bring? I know one is a quick access portal for staff, so they can enable/disable filtering or internet access on the fly.... I think

[Davit2005]

We got a few Demo units in at a last employment, we done this for Sophos, BLOXX and McAfee I think it was.

 

We decided to for Bloxx in the end, thngs like Sophos had Site Policy Test, where I don't think the others did else had but was a bit limiting on custom settings.

 

We have Sophos now and more or less happy with support, hardware etc.

[grant_girdwood]

Hi guys,

 

Regarding room level filtering, in Version 7 we introduce multiple ways this can be achieved;

 

• Zone level filtering which expands in to;
  
• Zone level filtering by Subnet
  
• Zone Level filtering by Computer Name(s)
  

 

To name a few, if you have any further queries regarding this I'm happy to answer them here/PM/via Support.

 

Cheers,

Grant

[themightymrp]

So does that mean we could create a group containing the computer names from an IT room? And then apply a policy to that?

 

Sounds great if so!!

 

Q) Is it possible to use the new quick access portal for non-admin staff to enable/disable internet access to a room?

[grant_girdwood]

So does that mean we could create a group containing the computer names from an IT room? And then apply a policy to that?

 

Sounds great if so!!

 

Q) Is it possible to use the new quick access portal for non-admin staff to enable/disable internet access to a room?

 

Yep, you can create a network zone and within that it can a mixture of computers / subnets that you can subsequently delegate access to through your delegated admins.

 

Delegated admins can then log on to the portal and disable internet access for that zone/sin bin individual users/view reports if you give them permission to

 

 

 

Cheers!

[grant_girdwood]

Oh yeah, the computer list is imported/updated from your AD via the LDAP import that is configured on the appliance.

[themightymrp]

Lovely jubbly This is exactly what we are after! Thanks!

[grant_girdwood]

No problem at all - have a good weekend

[kctesting]

Make sure you get the right Hardware from reseller; used BLOXX in the past for 3 years but it was a pain due to wrong hardware which wasn't capable for our traffic.

The good part is that they have good support, always in UK ; make sure you ask for Grant ...

[LiNE-NOiZ]

2012 Switched from Lightspeed to Bloxx. Kept it for 1 year then went back to Lightspeed. While Bloxx has excellent support, several features that sales promised were not there. While I have not seen the latest versions, the version I was on made me feel like I had to jump through so many hoops to get basic information.

My first priority is student safety. Basic reports such as suspicious searches were not there. (may be there with newer versions). Demo Lightspeed see if it fits your needs.

[internetuser]

Used bloxx for about 5 years now.

The support has gone down from what it was.

The hardware is OK, but in the last year the unit has had a couple of performance and memory leaks which took the support a few goes to fix while I got it in the neck.

[themightymrp]

We have only had Bloxx for a few short months. So far the support has been first rate, but we have recently been upgraded to OS version 7 which has introduced a few glitches that they are sorting for us (to do with SSL Intercept).

[internetuser]

Version 5 was pretty stable.

Version 6 based on silverlight has seemed slugish and bug ridden from day one to be honest, its stable now, but not what I would call lighting quick, and its a low end unit we have either, hopefully version 7 will resolve this.

[RayParlour]

Hi All,

As a teacher in a school, rather than an administrator, can anyone explain to me why my school makes all of our students download the safety certificate to their mobile devices and laptops? Is this what all schools that use Bloxx have to insist on or is our school deriving a benefit that I'm not aware of by insisting on this?

[rrrrr]

Hi All,

As a teacher in a school, rather than an administrator, can anyone explain to me why my school makes all of our students download the safety certificate to their mobile devices and laptops? Is this what all schools that use Bloxx have to insist on or is our school deriving a benefit that I'm not aware of by insisting on this?

 

This is the same for most brands of webfilter when dealing with non-domain (bring your own devices).When a user browses to a secure website, the traffic is encrypted. Because a webfilter is filtering traffic between the users device and the website there is a break in this link. The installation of this certificate tells the users device that the webfilter is trusted.

If the certificate is not installed, every time the user goes to a secure website a "unsafe site" warning will be shown.

[themightymrp]

Schools have an obligation to provide a certain level of internet filtering for the safety of students. In the case of a Bring Your Own Device system, the students laptops and mobiles are connecting and using the schools internet connection. Bloxx, as well as other school internet filters, act as a man-in-the-middle, allowing the filter to check internet page requests for their suitability I.e. Images or pages of an adult or dangerous content. This on its own works fine for some sites, however more and more websites including the likes of Google and Youtube (to name a few biggies) have switched to using HTTPS (or securely encrypted) pages. This would mean a web filter could not decide if a page was safe or not. The Bloxx certificate is a requirement for the filter to be able to safely decode these encrypted pages (excluding banking sites etc) and be able to filter the content correctly. Without the certificate you would get a lot of pages coming up with certificate warnings and being treated as an untrusted source. This would in turn stop many sites running things like flash and java, rendering the pages useless. There is no other benefit to the school other than them complying with internet safety rules