Dans Guardian

[Bankesy]

Hello

 

If anybody out there has any experience with Dans Guardian perhaps they can help me as I am convinced it is the root of a current problem.

 

Student traffic here at the school is first directed to a Linux PC running Dans Guardian before being sent out on port 8083 to the council.

 

Everything was working well until recently when students could no longer access the interactive textbooks on the Kerboodle site.

 

So to test this I logged on as a student and changed the internet connection properties to bypass the internal filter and go straight out on 8083 and it worked.

 

I cannot figure out what it is about Dans Guardian that could be stopping the content from loading, I don't appear to be having issues with any other sites and naturally it works if staff are logged onto the PC because their traffic only goes through the council proxy to begin with.

 

At first i thought it might be a group policy thing as I did around the same time rollback and then upgrade IE on the backup DC but this seems unlikely now.

 

I accept from recent reading that Dans Guardian has pretty much been unsupported for years but don't know if this would affect its configuration\functionality.

 

If anybody can shine a light on this it would be very helpful.

 

Thank you

[siuko]

The first thing I would try is adding the site to the exception site list in Dans Guardian - it will then ignore any issue with the site.

 

See if that stops your issues when using Dans Guardian.

[Bankesy]

I tried that but it made no difference.

 

I did notice that parts of the Dans Guardian system itself are being blocked by the council filter.

 

According to them none of the URLs that make up Dans Guardian appear in their logs but we have a high number of denied access attempts which apparently suggests Dans Guardian is being bypassed?

[siuko]

I did notice that parts of the Dans Guardian system itself are being blocked by the council filter.

 

According to them none of the URLs that make up Dans Guardian appear in their logs but we have a high number of denied access attempts which apparently suggests Dans Guardian is being bypassed?

 

Can you supply any screenshots of this?

 

It doesn't seem to make sense that the council filter will be blocking something internal to your network?

[Bankesy]

 

I hope you can see that, I'm not even sure if it's a relevant section of Dans Guardian.

 

It just seemed strange to me and I thought perhaps it was part of a bigger problem.

[siuko]

Seems strange that...

 

Do you have your browser setup to not use a proxy server for local addresses?

 

I don't understand how your council filter could even ban anything that was internal to your network - unless you have it setup rather strangely.

 

I could understand that certain files in the dans gaurdian page might get banned (as they probably contain words that need to be filtered out) but why would your external council filter even see these?

[JByford]

Internet explorer has very crude logic to determine if an address is local or not, if the address contains a dot it treats it as non local. This means if you browse to an internal IP address it will send it to the proxy, even if bypass local addresses is ticked. If you want to browse to a local device using an IP address you need to add part or all of the IP address to the bypass list in ie proxy settings.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Jonathan

[Bankesy]

I'm over that hurdle now, I did indeed just add the IP address of the Dans Guardian box to the proxy bypass list and the pages in question came to life.

 

Even though i previously said I didn't think it could be IE related I'm going to roll it back to version 9.

 

Maybe the server and clients have to be on the same version? Maybe the version of IE on the server determines the behaviour of certain group policies, Active X springs to mind particularly as the problematic content is Flash based.

[Bankesy]

For anybody still following this thread I have now come up with the answer:

 

Started by removing all config files for Dans Guardian from the Pupils section which got the content working again.

 

Then started putting the config files back one a time until the content stopped working again and this told me it was the Banned Domain Name list causing the problem.

 

Within this list it calls upon other lists from the proxy box so I disabled all of these, the content was working so I started re-enabling these additional lists until it stopped again and it turns out it was the File Hosting list causing the more specific problem.

 

So having been sent a list of sites to whitelist from Kerboodle I trawled this list and discovered it is the amazonaws.com entry that needs to be removed\allowed.