Schools Broadband & Netsweeper Transparent /in-line Beta

[Wubbalubbadub]

If you are reading this, then you might have seen my name in other posts regarding @SchoolsBroadband , i have been pretty open in launching out on the forums here during the lightspeed problems and even when they launched the NetSweeper Proxy soloution. Which im sure, most will agree have been pretty negative.

 

Well i think its only fair i post the positive too! Since the Lightspeed problems, David Tindall (Director) has made contact with me and asked if i would work with @SchoolsBroadband in testing the ALPHA of the new Netsweeper transparent soloution. I had 1 secondary and 5 primary schools all on the Lightspeed soloution, yelling at me to sort it out and when i Beta tested the proxy soloution i was so unimpressed that i actually asked to be put back on Lightspeed! So i agreed to help with the Transparent ALPHA.

 

During the recent summer holiday, i can now say (I was NDA bound!) that i worked closesly with Rob Mason (Product Development Manager) on the Netsweeper Transparent Soloution (ive bagged spot 0001! Will take bids for the number! ha!) and want to give @SchoolsBroadband some recognition in the work on this platform! I was going into the project with serious doubts and frankly a bad mindset... but how wrong i was! The soloution has really been built from the ground up as a perfect replacement for anyone who is currenty on the Lightspeed transparent solouton. So much so that i ended up asking to move all my schools to the ALPHA! (Rob wouldnt let me do them all in one day!).

 

For those of you considering if you should take up the offer for the BETA of the Netsweeper Inline / Transparent Soloution, here are a few questions and answers, which i would of wanted to know before doing the migration:

 

Q: How long will the migration take?

A: Bearing in mind i was in the ALPHA (So expected it to take a while), we had our secondary school transfered within 3 hours. The primary school took about 1 hour. (I want to add, that the primary school also have 0 issues upon returning to school after the holiday).

 

Q: How do you deploy the agent?

A: Via group policy - I helped make the guide on this. I have had 100% authentication rates so far.

 

Q: How is the logging?

A: Logging is viewable live, and can be narrowed down to IP / User / Device. Blocked content is highlighted, and ports also show on the pages. So seeing whats being blocked is now easy and much more efficient

 

Q: Does it support Captive portal for ipads etc?

A: Yes!

 

I hope this helps anyone considering taking up the beta offer, i can be a hard customer to please! But really have to commend everyone @SchoolsBroadband on there work on the inline soloution. Anyone wishing to ask me any questions regarding the inline soloution, from an actual customer who has gone through it, please feel free to contact me.

 

Matt

[Edu-IT]

What happens where you don’t want users to authenticate on iPad? Can you apply a standard filtering policy?

[RobMason]

What happens where you don’t want users to authenticate on iPad? Can you apply a standard filtering policy?

 

Yes we can apply filtering policies by IP, IP Range or Subnet if you do not require users to authenticate.

 

Thanks,

 

Rob

[clockend25]

I signed the NDA but unfortunately the timescales involved wouldn't have allowed us to have a look at the new platform before our renewal was up, so we made the decision to move. The work they had planned did seem a big step in the right direction.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hello everyone,

 

I can confirm what @MJTayloronline has said. Thank you Matt for Alpha testing this for us. Your feedback has been invaluable.

 

We are very pleased to announce a WORLD FIRST!

 

We are currently the only ISP in the world that can offer Netsweeper filtering in transparent mode AND, have the ability for multiple customers to have the same internal IP address AND and do this in a high availability Cisco load balanced environment. This means as all schools go to full 1Gbit leased lines and G.Fast (350Mbit) it will be able to cope with the huge increase in bandwidth demand we are now seeing which is generally because of the adoption of the cloud and more devices.

 

In co-operation with Netsweeper the code to achieve this has been written specifically for us and it works and absolute treat.

 

We have now invested over £500,000 in this new platform.

 

We have upgraded our Netsweeper platform over the summer to one of the most recent stable releases 6.x which also incorporates a lot of new features. Many of which are now available for our existing proxy based customers but will also be available to new transparent proxy customers also. High level features people have been asking for which will be available are

 

 

Transparent filtering, bye bye proxy for good

Full SSL decryption / inspection

IP based filtering

User based filtering (Windows AD, Google auth, Azure AD)

Group based filtering (Windows AD, Google auth, Azure AD)

Radius integration

Customisable and proactive filtering (new prevent and suicide / e-safety reports will be automatically setup for all customers)

Captive portal

Chrome plugin

Tiered access - If you are a MAT with x number of schools you look after then network managers can have access to each school but also a master login to cover all schools. If a change of policy filtering is required then this can be pushed to all and / or some schools in the MAT making changes extremely easy to do.

We will never have to change a customers internal IP address range

Offsite filtering

No need for IIS auth portal any longer

Massively improved logging ability (it's so much easier to unblock blocked sites / applications)

More need to the shared lists to work in the way they currently do

 

The transparent and proxy solution have 100% uptime since their inception and have 10's of Gbits of capacity.

 

The beta is now full but we expect to come out of this and will be offering this to all new customers by default. We will also be moving existing Netsweeper proxy and Lightspeed customers to the new platform over a prolonged period of time

 

Remember, by default all of our customers can be part of a Wide Area Network and we do not charge anything extra for this.

 

It's been a long time coming and thank you to all of our very patient customers.

 

If you've any questions feel free to add to this thread or send me a private message.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

P.S did I say no need for proxy settings ever? Not even in decrypting SSL?!

Edited September 14, 2018 by SchoolsBroadband

[fiza]

How is the new system on filtering users on Chromebooks?

[SchoolsBroadband]

works a treat.

 

Just install the chromebook plugin

 

Fully authenticates with google too if you use google auth.

 

dave

[fiza]

I've signed up for the beta so lets hope for the best!

[Dom_]

I'll echo what Matt said, following almost a year of constant (CONSTANT) issues and hundreds of support tickets using Netsweeper +proxy, I've just moved one of my primaries over and in 10 minutes everything is miraculously fixed.

 

It's like a stable Lightspeed. Need to get all my others onto the beta now!!!

Edited September 14, 2018 by Dom_

[Blue_Cookeh]

I also signed up for the BETA within minutes of receiving the e-mail - can't. wait.

 

Netsweeper has been pretty reliable so far but I can't wait for transparent filtering to come back

[Wubbalubbadub]

I also signed up for the BETA within minutes of receiving the e-mail - can't. wait.

 

Netsweeper has been pretty reliable so far but I can't wait for transparent filtering to come back

Good move. It's fantastic.