Any one got Puffin Academy to work on iOS behind smoothwall?

[ass17]

As the topic suggests can someone steer me to an answer to get Puffin Academy working for pupils.

[habashee]

I am also having problems with Puffin Academy browser. It slows right down or freezes up on Education City. It seems to work sometimes and certain parts of the day it doesnt work.

 

Anyone know alternatives?

[craigw]

We are not using Smoothwall but this may help.. We use Bluecoat and we had ALL sorts of trouble getting Puffin Academy to work. It appears that if the proxy / filter touches the traffic in ANY way you get network errors. Eventually got it to work by setting the IP range for puffin academy as defined in the FAQ on the bypass IP range for the Bluecoat box. This is not a policy setting but a global config setting in Bluecoat. I stress I tried doing it through the Policy Manager - e.g. Allow this IP range - website address, bypass ssl inspection etc - but it still failed. I assume it is because it was still proxying the traffic even though it was allowed. Entering in the bypass IP range however did the trick and it is now working....

Wally

[MikeBrockington]

@craigw - could you expand on that at all? We _do_ use BlueCoat, but I don't quite follow what you configured to make PA work.

[craigw]

Hi Mike

Sure - log into BC gui- go to Configuration, Services, Proxy Services.

Go to Static Bypass tab

We then added in three entries:

Client IP Address / ALL - Server IP Address - 216.218.220.0/27

Client IP Address / ALL - Server IP Address - 107.178.36.0/24

Client IP Address / ALL - Server IP Address - 54.241.21.123.32/32

 

These ranges were found from the page Puffin Academy FAQ

Tested this morning and still working OK.

Hope that helps...let me know.

Wally

[MikeBrockington]

Thanks craig, that was a perfect explanation, although the last IP should read 54.241.21.123/32

 

 

Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work for us. Still trying to work out why, but it looks like bypassing the proxy breaks our config somehow.

[Sylv3r]

Quick question, does anybody know how secure this Puffin App actually is?

 

What websites are you thinking about connecting via the app. Could they be harvesting all username / passwords used whilst browsing?

 

I am not trying to create an argument, but I just wonder what sort of information may be getting passed onto a third party. It's the one reason why we haven't installed it on our iPads.

[MikeBrockington]

CraigW,

Is your proxy running in Explicit Mode, or Transparent?

 

Thanks,

Mike

[craigw]

Hi there Mike

For the iPads in question we use Transparent mode. No proxy is set on the ipads and we do not authenticate the users on the iPad IP range.

Tested again this morning and still working OK. Happy to share any more info it helps (sorry for the delay getting back to you).

Craig