RM Buzz Chromebooks Authentication Delay

[ITManLT]

Hello All,

 

Just wondering if anybody else uses RM Buzz & User Based Filtering, and if you suffer any delays in authentication?

 

By this what I mean is, when you log in to the Chromebook with a user account (say username john.smith), Google Chrome automatically opens straight away and loads our homepage.

Then a couple of seconds later, the RM Buzz extension loads, and then tries to work out who's logged on to the Chromebook to provide User Based Filtering.

When this happens though, you have to close Chrome and open it again (presumably to pass on credentials to RM Buzz) before the filtering works.

 

Does anyone else with RM Buzz have this issue?

 

Thanks

[EssentialRug]

Yep we have this issue too.

As well we also get intermittent access to the internet. Days, weeks, months and all will be fine. Then some days students can log in, but no web pages will load at all. RM have acknowledged there is an issue with RM Buzz on ChromeOS which the developers are working to fix...

As soon we disable the RM Buzz extension it all works perfectly.

Anyone else having the issue I've described?

 

Thanks

[PlantHead]

We ditched RMBuzz because of exactly the problems you describe, it caused more problems than it solved.

[EssentialRug]

Did you ever log a support call or get any sort of acknowledgement from RM? It seems mad that they are aware of this issue but aren't communicating it to paying customers...

May I ask what you use instead? We are using Securly on another site which is working pretty well

[PlantHead]

We spent a year with RMBuzz logging various tickets and not really ever getting to the bottom of the problems.

The biggest issue was speed. With RMBuzz, websites took noticeably longer to load. RM made lots of config changes to our Google Admin to fix the issue but the final straw for us was when we discovered that the pupils were enabling developer mode on their Chromebooks and just switching RMBuzz off.

 

We use our firewall to do the filtering. The Chromebooks all stay onsite so they have to go through our firewall.

[EssentialRug]

Oh great...that doesn't bode well for hoping these issues would be quickly resolved then...

Do you run any reporting software to see which student (if any) has been attempting to access unsuitable content?

[ITManLT]

Ooh, this has gained a few comments since the silence of January to July now! - Glad to hear I'm not alone with these issues.

It's such a shame because in general, with the RM ISP service and even SafetyNet, we've never really had any issues.

When it comes to Buzz, it does seem to be causing headaches on the Chromebooks.

 

I have a call logged about this, and have done since 25th September 2018.... still no resolution to our Buzz issues.

Interesting to hear that they have admitted their is a problem. Currently our Buzz extension no longer installs on the Chromebooks at login... I'm wondering if that's related.

 

It's worth mentioning, that RM have recently implemented transparent user based filtering. We are moving onto a different circuit on Wednesday next week that will enable us to make use of this.

From what I am aware, this will just be an SSL login screen similar to the likes of Smoothwall.

As a result of this, I'm hoping we can ditch RM Buzz on the Chromebooks, and as we have a specific SSID for our Chromebooks, we can just point the IP Range to this Transparent UBF.

 

I will feed back at some point after Wednesday next week to let you know how this goes, this may be something worth implementing if it works.

[EssentialRug]

I agree, we've never really had any issues across SafetyNet, ISP Service or Unify...I do remember we signed up to SafetyNet and UBF when we heard that we would be able to set up custom alerts. This was promised in Autumn 2017 and it has only just been released which is a bit disappointing.

If you wouldn't mind feeding back about your transparent UBF that would be great. That could be something we would look to implement for sure.

[steve_forbes]

Hi there, I'm the Product Manager for RM SafetyNet (and RM Buzz). Thanks for your feedback, I'm going to investigate and will come back to you on the issues you raise here. If you have any specific support call numbers that might help then please let me know.

Also really interested in my other feedback you have in general about either products.

[EssentialRug]

Thank you Steve for the update.