Internet problems

[bobt]

Both include filtering, firewall, connection etc.

 

Very much like-for-like otherwise we wouldn't consider them.

[FragglePete]

We've had nothing but problems since the start of term. I had a rep in the other day from SWGfL assuring us and apologising for the recent issues. But yesterday we noticed issues and now we've got major issues again!

 

I do have a Virgin Media quote sitting in my Inbox at present; very tempted now.

 

Pete

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks @bobt we'll beat any genuine quote on a like for like with a leased line.

 

Dave

[FragglePete]

Marvellous - issues once again on the normal proxy for us. Joke. Absolute joke.

 

Pete

[mpe]

Me too

"please use the proxy whilst we are looking into it"

 

Grrrrr

Staff proxy is set by group policy and the teachers don't really know enough to change the proxy anyway

 

But possibly worst would be the ones who *think* they know what they are doing. So might know how but have no idea when it's appropriate to be trying to change things.

[Oaktech]

Today's fun and games: Internet drops completely, but only for really short periods. Most people aren't noticing anything, but anyone who is streaming music (PE and me) or video is getting the right hump.

 

I've checked and a ping -t to bbc.co.uk is showing packet loss of 10 seconds in any 5 minute period. I've rung swgfl and they have acknowledged it was them after I sent them the ping trace, but it's not improved since about 10am.

[witch]

It hasn't improved at all

I am interested in any solution that will have filtering and firewall etc, definitely

[Oaktech]

It hasn't improved at all

I am interested in any solution that will have filtering and firewall etc, definitely

 

Have a chat to Jason about their Broadband 4 product... I've got Claire on the case for us and it's looking like a pretty good deal. 10fold hike in speed and on premises lightspeed filtering for about £800 more a year.

[bobt]

@Oaktech what company is it you are using?

 

BT Local Business is a fair shout aswell. I believe they do Smoothwall.

[Oaktech]

@bobt

 

This is through CCC/Schoolcare The product they are offering is this:

 

High Speed Broadband for Education

[mpe]

Fed up with this. We have Ofsted today so doubly fed up. I feel a great loyalty to SWGfL and their staff but this poor level of service is just completely unacceptable.

 

Who are people switching to? I think we will defo be switching but what provision of monitoring and filtering come with oher ISPs?

 

 

I've never found the SWGfL monitoring to be much good. Especially given that they'll insist on telephoning schools and asking secretaries to mess around with routers even when looking at diagnistics would indicate that the problem is elsewhere.

 

Filtering is in practice far more of a political than a technical exercise too.

[Tall_Paul]

We're having a really strange problem, be interesting to see if anyone else is experiencing it.

 

Occasionally certain websites (like Learn to code | Codecademy) come up with something like a 404 error in Chrome but work fine in IE.

 

It's maddening when it happens, and because it doesn't happen constantly it's difficult to troubleshoot.

 

Is anyone else seeing anything like this?

[newpersn]

Message this morning about the emails

Our outbound mail servers have been placed on blacklists by 3rd parties. Changes have been made to the servers to rectify the issue. Ref: 4766376

[Oaktech]

Message this morning about the emails

 

Ah... I'vee just got that text. Fortunately we are O365.

 

Got a bit wierded out by that as it's not come from the usual SWGFL text number.

[Boredguy]

The other week when they had the mailbox storage issue for Easymail, I had texts from half a dozen different numbers. I wouldn't care, but we've never had easymail but it's a case of either getting all service outages messages or none... no way to just flag the components we use to be notified about (aka connectivity and the proxy farm)

[FragglePete]

An update from us, as we seemed to have no end of issues last term and to provide a bit of balance. Last term we were caught up in all sorts of issues (Google, DDoS Attacks, etc) that generally gave us poor performance, and I had a number of calls opened. What concerned us is that we still seemed to be experiencing issues when SWGfL were adamant that all was well.

 

Swindon schools (well, some at least), get there feed from Swindon Borough Council (SBC) which has SWGfL as it's bearer. We get an allotted range of addresses from SWGfL that is essentially just pushed out to us by the network team at SBC. It's been away of keeping costs down for Swindon schools as a whole. During our recent troubles, much monitoring of our connection was done by both SBC and SWGfL and we were far from using its full capacity.

 

The issue for us is that with our new Sixth Form opening this year, we were reaching saturation on our IP address range and had always wanted to VLAN up our network - so used this as an excuse to do this exercise. Because of the 'unique' way we get our feed, it limits us somewhat on what we can do with the connection to SWGfL, so introduced a NAT box in the form of RRAS running on a new HP MicroServer to look after routing out on to SWGfL network from our Private address range we had setup. This was put in over Summer and all seemed to be well. However, during busy periods in September we experienced issues and our NAT box came under a lot of scrutiny. The suppliers were adamant that it was more than capable of the role at hand, but the issue again seems to be unique for SWGfL......

 

SWGfL expect our web traffic to come from a multitude of addresses from our allotted IP range, each of these addresses is distributed out to servers within their proxy farm which does all the necessary filtering, caching, etc. The problem with us was that all our traffic was coming from one IP address on our range. So, all our traffic was hitting just one Proxy server and it was starting to struggle with the load. This was at least the theory, which makes sense.

 

During the half term period, we installed the Business Essentials edition of Sophos UTM (ie. Free) on an old server and utilised the Masquerading NAT capabilities of this. This allowed us to assign a different SWGfL IP address from our range to each VLAN we had setup. So, now our traffic is distributed over at least 8 separate IP addresses..... so far, so good. Web browsing appears to quick again and so far no complaints and we've been running this configuration for nearly two weeks now. I may take it even further and VLAN up a bit more so we can spread over even more IP addresses but for now all seems well and am receiving no complaints.

 

Pete

[Brpilot99]

I changed my 2 schools to Virgin over a year ago .... never looked back since ... great pricing for what we want and Censornet filtering ..

[pirran]

We've been having the same issues as everyone else in regards to SWGFL. The performance on transparent proxy is just horrific, even with the proxy settings applied the service is quite awful. As soon as a user is logged into staff.proxy everything improves dramatically, unfortunately this isn't an option for the 1000+ devices used by students.

 

Has anyone managed to break out there contract early due to the less than acceptable service they've been receiving?

 

I'm currently testing out this free (open source) proxy switcher Proxy Switcher with group policy extensions. Hopefully it will make life easier for all our staff with laptops.