Internet Filter recommendations

[LAEStratford]

Has anyone had any experience with BLOXX, Smoothwall and MXSweep ?

 

Any recommendations ?

[john]

You will find plenty of people for Smoothwall on the forum as well as others. Have a search as we have many many threads on what to buy / do / use.

[synaesthesia]

Never heard of MXSweep, doesn't sound particularly good. Lots of positives for Smoothie as said above. Had very little experience of BLOXX but what I have seen wasn't too positive; there's a few happy customers on here though if I remember correctly.

Lightspeed are probably among the best along with Smoothie and well worth a look.

[gdrinkall]

Im looking at Bloxx and Lightspeed tomorrow to compare to the smoothwall we currently use before deciding on the next move once our contract expires next month. I think it will take a very good system (and a good price) to move me from Smoothwall as its a solid system and with the added support for Chromebooks that they have just introduced its ticking most of the boxes

[MrFrostmaul]

We use Lightspeed and had about a year now and been very impressed with it, never had a problem with it failing and has very detailed logging of all internet traffic users are making. Also very simple to unblock, block etc. for different User Groups/OU's etc. and the scheduling feature where it can swap rule sets is very handy such as Facebook is unblocked after school hours for students and blocked during lesson time.

[caffrey]

Don't forget to check that any solution is able to fit in your infrastructure too

[mrbios]

Sorry about the slight thread hijack, but which system is it that also has an optional extra in that you can filter laptops even after they leave your premises? Is that smoothwall?

[SchoolsBroadband]

@mrbios you can do this with Lightspeed if you want to upgrade ?

[mrbios]

@mrbios you can do this with Lightspeed if you want to upgrade ?

 

I didn't realise that! Will send you a PM.

[danjoslin]

We looked at all the usual suspects but settled on iboss for our school. It is not yet as well known in the UK as they only recently set up here, but they claim to be No1 in USA education.

 

iboss has a really nice modern look and feel and uses their own technology instead of a proxy server so is much quicker than our old product that ended up a bottleneck on our 100mb line. It was also cheaper and includes stuff like full bandwidth management and MDM to filter your laptops and mobiles off premise!

 

They will lend you a box to play with without any sales pressure, or PM me if you want more info on our setup.

[KK20]

we have swapped from our venerable squid/dansguardian to squid/diladele (used to be qlproxy) last year. Using purely the GUI it doesn't have all the capabilities of dansguardian but can easily have if you tinker with the odd file underneath. SSL bumping works (ours is a subordinate CA to our CA so no need to add certificates as root) and can be tailored to only SSL bump certain sites (youtube for instance to ensure all iterations of youtube go to education!). Uses slightly more resources than the old DG but is much quicker. Reporting is fairly limited but if you understand SQL then this isn't an issue (MySQL workbench etc) - there is a wealth of information logged so you can tailor your own SQL reports easily enough.

 

AD integration works out of the box with minimal configuration and there are excellent documents on setting Linux up (various distro) on their site.

Edited February 6, 2015 by KK20