Netsweeper

[caffrey]

Has anyone got any unbiased opinions on Netsweeper ? Had a demo recently and liked what I saw - how is it in real world terms ?

[Jawloms]

We started using it in April. No issues. We tend to pretty much ignore it and it sits there and does it's thing. If you can forget it's there, that's a good sign for me. One of my techies has a root around the logs just to check there's nothing untoward in there and she thinks it's pretty good.

[TMBS]

I'll second the above. It does the job, offers a Prevent report so it ticks that box. I've set up a few other reports too which run daily and you can set to email to behaviour, SLT, etc. The logs are useful when trying to work out what's being blocked.

 

The only downside so far it we're only given limited access to the portal, I'd like to be able to reset users passwords but can't. Students last week could access YouTube which we ban, we were told that was because they'd changed how it was categorised but I felt that should have been picked up automatically.

[DavidYoung]

We've been trialling the Netsweeper implementation from LGfL and it is much better than their Webscreen product (also Netsweeper but hidden behind their own GUI).

 

The thing to remember with Netsweeper is that it is a nearly infinitely flexible product which scales from small networks to carrier-grade filtering which each being configured very differently. Make sure you know what you want to achieve before installation as the outcome will depend greatly on how it is configured for your situation.

 

If you do proxy filtering, I suggest you stay away from NTLM and use their Wagent app to authenticate. We're just testing making the switch and they've just released the beta version of the Chrome agent.

 

Reporting is good but you need to learn how to make the reports. A great feature is being able to see live traffic through the system which is so helpful in troubleshooting.

[caffrey]

The live traffic thing is good, I use it on Smoothwall but from the demo I had Netsweeper seemed more flexible in that regard e.g. you can add a site from the live data to be allowable for a set amount of time. With Smoothwall I need to cut and paste that URL and remember to take it out of the allow list when the lesson is done - This is handy for PHSE