Viable Alternatives to K9 Webprotection

[browolf]

One of our assistant heads gets money to buy laptops for pupil premium students.

 

Whilst the students are at school we're obliged to provide web filtering for them at home.

 

We've been buying copies of K9 webprotection but managing that is a horrible experience.

 

-we have to buy an annual license with a credit card and there's no option to turn off auto-renewal

-we have to email support to get auto-renewal turned off and since symantec bought them support is slow and inconsistent.

Once they cancelled the licenses instead of turning off auto-renewal.

-There's no way of checking the status of licenses apart from getting a list that marks licenses that have been used in the last 15 days on a list of all the licenses we've ever purchased.

Doesn't show expiry dates and kids don't tell us their internet stopped working for weeks/months.

 

I've asked LCC if there's a way we can do it with lightspeed but I doubt there is.

 

Ideally if we could enforce a filtered proxy on them....if there was another school that could provide that I'm sure I we'd pay for it.

 

or there's some other software or proxy service?

[Norphy]

Smoothwall have their Connect filter which sounds like it does what you want:

 

https://help.smoothwall.net/Glamis/Content/connectfilter/about.htm

[TechMonkey]

I'm sure I remember from a demo that Lightspeed could do devices off site, but that may have been sales guff or maybe technically tricky if LCC's setup is not tuned for it. I'm trying to remember the software I have seen that basically logs all the sites looked at when off the network and then reports back when reconnected. I don't think it filtered though, just logged. Smoothwall have a way to route traffic through if it is set as the Proxy, I think it is called Global Proxy, but I have not got it working so can't comment on it.

 

OpenDNS may be an option if you can set the DNS servers.

[chazzy2501]

a poor solution might be to connect the laptops via direct access and force web tunnelling through the school. Same access as on site.

[TomFreeman]

When we do this we tend to buy an Antivirus package with it built in, we've used McAfee previously for this but had some issues when Win 10 first came out and went to Kaspersky, not done it in a little while.

 

We've made them bring them in at the one year point and purchased another key and done it that way as it's so much cheaper than the renewal normally. We also get to do a check of the laptop then as well.

[rogerdnixon]

We use Securly on Chromebooks for this. Their basic product is free. The paid for product which we use allows guardians to control the offsite filtering if you allow it. We also use it for all our onsite filtering as well. Easy to use, setup and manage. You do need either G Suite or Azure AD.

[Brimstone]

Lightspeed announced Relay 2.0 at Bett, looks very good....

 

https://community.lightspeedsystems.com/lessons/partner-what-is-relay2/

[AlanD]

Note that the prevent strategy requires you to monitor... And while filtering would almost certainly be appropriate... You need to do more than that. I would be using intune to manage such laptops to lock them down an use aproxy configuration to direct traffic via our smooth wall filter. I think most filtering/monitoring solutions have configurations to work with off site devices.. And should provide the monitoring schools are required to do.

[Ditto]

We use Securly on Chromebooks for this. Their basic product is free. The paid for product which we use allows guardians to control the offsite filtering if you allow it. We also use it for all our onsite filtering as well. Easy to use, setup and manage. You do need either G Suite or Azure AD.

 

We've just started with Securly and appeared to have home filtering on before we were quiet ready. Fixed now - just a couple of clicks. Although we are Chromebooks, they stay in school, so we presume we were filtering from a PC (or phone). Before giving a thumbs up for Securly for the OP, I'd like to understand one detail. At home, off the school network, if a pupil isn't using chrome and logged in to their school account, how does it filter in that case? For example, if the pupil (or parent) is using a shared PC, using IE or Edge, what/how does Securly filter?

[rogerdnixon]

We've just started with Securly and appeared to have home filtering on before we were quiet ready. Fixed now - just a couple of clicks. Although we are Chromebooks, they stay in school, so we presume we were filtering from a PC (or phone). Before giving a thumbs up for Securly for the OP, I'd like to understand one detail. At home, off the school network, if a pupil isn't using chrome and logged in to their school account, how does it filter in that case? For example, if the pupil (or parent) is using a shared PC, using IE or Edge, what/how does Securly filter?

 

At home, it will only work on devices where the Securly extension is present. So the user would need to sign into Chrome with their school account. So if they were on a private PC and used a different browser or none school account, then there would be nothing. Offsite its aimed at Chromebooks which are managed and restricted to your domain only - so they get the extension etc. Private devices are not affected.

[Ditto]

@RogerDixon - that confirms what we suspected. We saw logs for a few pupils, but it was INSET, so we believe they were logged in to their account at home on Chrome. Two concerns on this front.

i) parent/older sibling etc browses on this shared device not realising it's being monitored.

ii) Staff member logs in to their account on chrome browser at home for a bit of work, then forgets to log out and does a bit of 'private' surfing in a new tab/window. I'm not sure everyone will be comfortable with that. Currently the only minimal defence we have is to implement controlled session length but we are trialling 4 hour and 8 hour sessions so still could be an issue.

[rogerdnixon]

It's not been an issue for us. We are very clear to all users that activity on school accounts is monitored.

[Ditto]

I 100% agree about clear communication - something I'm trying to get our SLT to move forwards with.

[browolf]

K9 are touting versions of Norton but it's incredibly unclear what version includes a webfilter.

 

I talked to Smoothwall about a possible solution, they said they'd look into it and that was the last I heard 3 weeks ago :-(

[browolf]

County are ditching Lightspeed for netsweeper now, anything in that?

[mavhc]

They're owned by the school? I'd just force them to vpn into school, and then use the same system as you use in school. And put a big "this computer belongs to x school, all usage is monitored at all times, only to be used for school work" sticker on it. And make sure it has no webcam, don't want those problems even being a possibility.