Smoothwall Categorys to Allow

[foofighterjim]

Having a bit of a dilemma with Smoothwall at the moment.

 

We are a medium sized secondary and have just implemented a Smoothwall UTM appliance setup in education mode. As expected we are finding things a little restrictive at the moment and I have been toying with the idea of allowing certain groups through to help reduce the number of individual URL exceptions we are making. For example dropbox is blocked from the file hosting group, I would also assume that many other sites we would access would also come under this category. The problem I have is the unknown, what if this category is blocking a site that is hosting malicious files that I would like to block, I have no way of being sure of everything this category block is protecting us from.

 

This isn't coming from a workload viewpoint for me or my team, this is trying to ensure we aren't restricting teaching and learning too much.

 

I know these are calls that we make alone but how liberal are others here?

[Sagima]

On Smoothwall we really only block Legal and Liability Issues, Adult Themes (but we do allow weapons, abortion and tattoos/body piercings), social media and games. We have 144 exceptions to those (custom allow list). 21 sites in the allowed lists are in custom blocked. Youtube is blocked for the lower school and primary students.

There is a certain amount of "common sense" in what we release/block based on reports from staff and students but it is the senior deputy head's call as to what is blocked as she's still happy with the 2002 document that was created when the school got some sort of rm filtering thing. She gets anything we are in two minds about.

[OB1]

Having a bit of a dilemma with Smoothwall at the moment.

 

We are a medium sized secondary and have just implemented a Smoothwall UTM appliance setup in education mode. As expected we are finding things a little restrictive at the moment and I have been toying with the idea of allowing certain groups through to help reduce the number of individual URL exceptions we are making. For example dropbox is blocked from the file hosting group, I would also assume that many other sites we would access would also come under this category. The problem I have is the unknown, what if this category is blocking a site that is hosting malicious files that I would like to block, I have no way of being sure of everything this category block is protecting us from.

 

This isn't coming from a workload viewpoint for me or my team, this is trying to ensure we aren't restricting teaching and learning too much.

 

I know these are calls that we make alone but how liberal are others here?

 

There are a very small number of categories on Smoothwall that you should actually Allow.

Examples are Education & Reference, Academic Institutions and Online Banking.

File Hosting is definitely not on this list. Don't allow this category.

 

It's very common for our customers to want to use a small subset of a category and block the rest of it, which is why our policy table works the way it does and why it's so customizable.

 

It's perfectly normal for a school to have quite a restrictive policy and a list of sites specific to their needs that are allowed.

Dropbox is one example, some schools allow Twitter but block all other Social Netwokring, or allow specific game sites and block the rest.

This list is different in every school.

[foofighterjim]

Hi @OB1

 

I know we are probably getting a little wound up as a lot of sites that were previously allowed are being blocked by Smoothwall. This is causing some frustration in lessons and although staff are letting us know about sites I still can't shake the feeling that we are being a bit too restrictive. Using the File Hosting group as an example, why would I want to block it? The description seem benign enough and would just need staff to be reminded of data protection and compliance.

 

Obviously things are improving every day with us reviewing and adding more sites to our allowed list.

[OB1]

Hi @OB1

 

I know we are probably getting a little wound up as a lot of sites that were previously allowed are being blocked by Smoothwall. This is causing some frustration in lessons and although staff are letting us know about sites I still can't shake the feeling that we are being a bit too restrictive.

This will improve as time goes on. I'd be interested in some examples though.

 

Using the File Hosting group as an example, why would I want to block it? The description seem benign enough and would just need staff to be reminded of data protection and compliance.

There are a large number of sites in that category.

Some of them have no moderation or virus scanning at all, so people can upload and download literally anything they want.

Seriously, if you're in a school, block this category and make exceptions for the services you use.

 

Obviously things are improving every day with us reviewing and adding more sites to our allowed list.

As I said, the customisation will slow down as time goes on.

Do you have Education and Reference allowed? We've found this can help considerably.