Pro's and Con's of Smoothwall and RM SafteyNet

[Decimas6]

Hi All,

 

We are currently looking at filtering and would like to know peoples opinions and facts about Smoothwall and SafetyNet. Is the price difference between the two worth it? Considering both Secondary and Primary.

 

Thanks for any advice.

[cullingsh]

We had Smoothwall at one school (which ahs been sadly sidelined for Netsweeper...) and RM SafetyNet in use at another school.

 

Smoothwall is lovely. Support has always been great. It's relatively easy to use.

SafetyNet required an extra chunk of money to enable user-based filtering on top of the basic filtering, and required everyones passwords to be reset. Worse than that, the RM engineers installed the AD integration component wrong and everyones password had to be reset, again.

 

Smoothwall - required no passwords to be reset, just a user account for access to AD.

 

Smoothwall allows you to track what sites an IP/user is trying to access so you can see what is blocked - useful when trying to get something working. Haven't yet found this feature in SafetyNet.

 

Smoothwall can have as many policies as you want, never found a limit. Safety is something like 8. By the time I had an allowed and blocked list for staff, pupils admins and everyone I had no room to create anything for testing.

 

I still don't get on with SafetyNet very well despite being involved with it for the past 6 months. Smoothwall I configured for the school in half a day.

 

Think that's enough for now...

[tony_norman]

I would go with Smoothwall (or a similar product such as components from the Fortinet suite). Although these products are expensive for schools, they do have the range of resources needed to tackle all the modern filtering/firewall needs. Tackling the dynamic threats we all face is well covered by supporting unified threat management ( see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_threat_management ). To effectively manage our internet service does require the tools for the trade, and I feel Smoothwall is an excellent product and has excellent support. With an appliance on-site and cloud-based components this does ensure that I can manage my own issues very promptly - a block in place in 30 seconds.

 

I used RM SafteyNet until a couple of years ago. Getting changes made could be a bit too slow for my liking, as the service was entirely cloud-based and necessitated email or telephone calls to get a concern looked at. Some delays would occur while a panel of experts would discuss whether a block was acceptable, based on consensus. The system was simple - static black lists, white lists of URLs and IPs. Due to the simplicity the service was very cheap. I haven't checked it out since 2014, but it desperately needed a means for end users to get an immediate block in place and some functionality for dealing with man in the middle attacks, deep packet inspection and other dynamic tools.

 

I suppose it comes down to you get what you pay for. The modern tools like Smoothwall do provide the comprehensive suite of features for monitoring and managing your filtering/firewall. In Smoothwall's case their support in excellent (I have just spent time at the BETT Show in London talking to quite a few colleagues on this topic, and they all agreed Smoothwall support is first class).

[STBGru]

We have Smoothwall at my school and 3 other primaries that we support currently. We moved from RM around 1 year ago to another provider (I won't mention names to keep on topic), whilst we have had some issues with our provider our Smoothwall solution whilst not the cheapest solution, it has always been very robust and brings some excellent features to our schools.

 

With RM we always had the issue of where new sites came out some of our students could access that hadn't been categorised, where as the Smoothwall has got around this with it's context filtering, which has also taken a lot of the stress out of white listing key sites such as BBC where it reads the context of the page.

Another major benefit is one that our Primaries are getting a lot of benefit from now is the the read only ability on social sites and also the ability to block comments on YouTube, this has saved a lot of headaches with safeguarding due to the fact that people don't seem to be able to put relevant replies to any video these days!

 

I hope this helps you a little

[elsiegee40]

We had Safetynet as part of a leased line. I agree that getting changes made was too slow. We ended up with smoothwall and ditched the leased line for BT. Never regretted it.