Firewall changes over Easter

[foofighterjim]

Just had the following email from Link:

 

"Link2ICT Firewall Update – April 2014

 

Firewall Issues – Background

The new Link2ICT Firewall Solution (Checkpoint) was introduced over the Christmas break to replace the aged Cisco solution. This was implemented, as the existing solution was unable to provide the ‘Next Generation’ functionality required of today’s modern firewalls.

 

Due to the complexity of the Cisco firewall, it was not possible to carry out a phased migration of school Internet traffic. A decision was therefore made to migrate all schools at once, and to ensure all support services were in place for when schools returned.

 

Upon schools’ return, Internet access problems were experienced, caused by extremely high volumes of traffic over short periods of time.

 

For a more detailed and technical explanation of events, please refer to the Link2ICT Knowledgebase Article KB0012440

 

Moving Forward

As part of the ongoing to work to stabilise and enhance the services offered by the new Firewall solution, a number of configuration updates will be carried out over the coming weeks. The first update will look to isolate high Internet volumes from daily application traffic via delivery of a new separate ‘Virtual’ firewall.

 

The timetable of migration for all schools is:

 

Sunday 13th April, 10am – 8pm. All school Internet traffic will be re-routed.

 

There may be disruption to Internet access whilst the work is being carried out. However, VPN connections will not be affected.

 

External IP addresses for the Link2ICT proxy servers will change, please refer to Knowledgebase Article KB0012440 if this may impact your services.

 

Volunteers Needed

During the week beginning Monday 14th April (first week of Easter break), we would like as many schools as possible to access the Internet using the Link2ICT Network. High volumes of traffic will allow us to gauge the success of this implementation and if you can help us to generate some of this traffic, we would be extremely grateful.

 

In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact the Link2ICT Service Desk on 0121 303 5100 – [email protected] or log into the Link2ICT Support Portal."

 

Biggest thing to note is that the proxys are changing so if you reference by IP you will need to change. No mention on if they will just change their DNS for the eduproxy record but I suspect they will.

[Trapper]

Why do I never get these emails?!

 

The office manager might fling it past me a week or two later!

[foofighterjim]

I'm sure if you send Link a message they will add you to the list.

[Little-Miss]

Funnily enough i was going to post this in the other thread earlier. Ours come through the enquiry address and they bounce them to me from there...

[foofighterjim]

Funnily enough i was going to post this in the other thread earlier.

 

So was I but I didn't want to send the thread off topic.

 

My problem is that because we had nothing planed, me and all my staff are off over Easter. There are some classes in though, so now I need to find out what they are doing and possibly cancel my plans if the internet is required and something happens. However I am grateful for the improvement of communication, previously I wouldn't have known anything was happening until it all went wrong.

[CHR1S]

I love how they ask for the internet to be used to test it, while 90% of people wont be in, way to get an accurate representation!

I can see the reply when it all falls over first week back under real use - "we tested it under load in the holiday, it worked fine then"