Light Speed / Talk Straight required school to change IP address scheme ??

[bewlay51]

Hi All -

Can anyone help with the following problem or offer an explanation as to why the following is required.

 

Our School have just signed a new 3 year agreement with Talk Straight, and let me first say we have not had any issues with the service or support they have offered in the past. That is why we choose to sign up for another 3 years and take up their offer of free LightSpeed MDM.

 

We filled in a network information sheet and shortly after returning it we received an email telling us we needed to completely change our internal IP addressing scheme for the whole school, if we didn't LightSpeed would not work. Our IP scheme is 192.168.x.x. /22 - the schema we needed to be moved to 192.168.16.0 /22

 

Our school is a big primary school spread across three building, we have five servers, a big managed wireless network (AP's with fixed IP's), IP telephone system (with IP hand free phones), a CCTV system plus lots of networking printers. We don't have access to the IP phone system or manged wireless so a charge will be incurred to re-configure these.

 

This was explained to Talk Straight, and they suggested keeping them on the same IP address, but anything that needed filtering would need to be on the new IP range. It stands to reason that if we did this we would then need some internal routing between the two network schema?

 

I have to say the internal network has been flawless we have not had any issues at all.

 

Considering the amount of work involved in changing the IP address scheme (and if it works don't fix it!!) we are very reluctant to carry out the work just to be able to manage a hand full of iPads. I checked with a number of other school using LightSpeed and they have not had to make any changes at all??

 

It's worth mentioning that the Fortinet filtering is being moved to the cloud and we feel that the IP address change is more about that then LightSpeed.

 

Can anyone throw any light on this please, has your school experience the same issues ??

 

Thanks.....

Edited October 7, 2015 by bewlay51

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi @bewlay51,

 

I'm just getting into London on the train but will get back to you later today.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[ReBoot]

I can't see why this would be necessary unless they have some sort of template addressing scheme they use for all their sites. Looking at the subnet they require you to use suggests NAT is being done at your site so you should be able to use anything you want with the proper network configuration.

 

Comparing the work involved in you re-addressing your whole school vs your supplier tailoring their solution is a no brainer - they should tailor their addressing to support you.

 

Requiring you to undertake this amount of work without prior warning (before you signed up) wouldn't give me a good feeling about the suppliers competence.

[Oaktech]

The company I'm going with for broadband who use lightspeed wanted me to change my internal IP addressing as we use a 192.168.x.x scheme. I told them that was ridiculous and that if I was going to have to change they were going to come and help me do it. For free. Or we wouldn't sign up.

 

We haven't changed our IP scheme.

 

I suspect they are trying to make their lives easier by applying 1 set of rules to one IP range and another set of rules to another IP range.

[synaesthesia]

Because the rockets are hosted at SB, they are shared with other schools who may also have conflicting IP ranges with yours. Generally someone's going to have to change; this isn't a problem for the majority as typically schools had IP address ranges provided by their LEA specific to their site(s). When we shifted to SB originally this was brought up as we had kept our IP range similar but expanded it massively to allow for 8000 devices, compared to the original 255. SB were able to accommodate this and we were not required to make any changes.

I would assume in some cases it would not be feasible for them to change however it'd be less feasible for a school to change. That should have been made clear to you on signup.

I'm sure David and the team will be able to help as much as possible; I would imagine it would be either NAT'ing the setup out and relying on AD authentication for filtering or moving to another of their hosted rockets.

 

FYI Fortigate will be doing no further filtering when you're on Lightspeed; it'll be firewall/routing duties only.

[sted]

i seem to remember when lln was taken out back and shot and schools bb took over some of my schools they were definitely happy they all had their own unique ip ranges as iirc an engineer said they had issues when manchester? schools came to them and they all had the same ip ranges

[Marshall_IT]

As far as i know they use the 192.168.0.0 range in their internal network at their data centre and this would cause issues with routing etc.

Also as mentioned above there are a lot of schools all on the same hosted LS / fortinet system which uses IP addressing to identify which school and policies apply etc.

 

This is very simplified view of course.

 

Are you moving from on-site to hosted with SB btw?

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi folks,

 

sorry for the late reply I'm in London at the moment. In Tameside (I'm presuming that's where you're at @bewlay51 ?)the former LA had the wonderful idea of putting all schools on the same IP address range (please don't ask me why!) which was a 192.168.0.x or similar I believe. This is in contrast to all other LA's who gave schools their own unique IP range.

 

Schools can have the same IP ranges as others so long as we put the school on a different cluster of Lightspeed Rockets in our data centre. Generally this really isn't a problem as its very rare a school has a conflicting IP address range. At point of sale we always ask what your range is and check if their are any potential issues. As you are a previous customer using an onsite Fortigate device I do wonder if this has been overlooked in your case and if so I can only apologise. We will do something to rectify this for you.

 

I'll send you a PM and take it up personally with our technical department.

 

FYI we can do this if you use hosted Fortigate only as Fortinet allow full virtualisation and separation so its fine for schools to have the same IP address but Lightspeed can't. 99.9% of all schools on hosted have Lightspeed though as its the better filtering product hence why we are moving all onsite fortigate only customers to hosted.

 

We really don't have any scaling issues of our solution so please don't let this make you think we can't deliver as we've way over 1,000 schools we've already delivered this to!

 

And as always just send me a PM and I will sort

 

Thanks

 

Dave