BTLS Moving to Netsweeper from Lightspeed

[ticktock]

It was the first I'd heard of it when I got the call off Martin as well although they insisted the message had gone out on the portal. We are late July a well. Best to leave it until it settles down.

[Mark182]

Yeah, we are Aug 27th so let us know how you all get on.

[SchoolsBroadband]

we've now moved over 500 schools from Lightspeed to Netsweeper. The biggest issue schools have is the lists they'd made on Lightspeed.

 

We actually migrate this over which takes quite some time and a lot of effort but we find for those non tech savvy schools it just makes their lives a lot easier. However it costs us a lot in resource to do it.

 

My advice is plan plenty of time to test the URL's as you move them over. Lightspeed and Netsweeper URL and wildcards are slightly different so its not just the case of necessarily copying and pasting over depending on what you have in there.

 

Good luck

 

Dave

[ticktock]

Why did you change from Lightspeed. Was it cost?

[SchoolsBroadband]

No, stability, scalability, support and features.

[ticktock]

I've never had any issue with support, Lightspeed are always really helpful. The product has been rock solid (for us, I can't speak for others) and is used by many schools in Lancashire. It also has all the features I need. It just works (for me anyway!).

[Patrick]

For me, i can see no reason to change other than cost. It's been solid and i've had no issues using it at all.

[Joanne]

I think it has come to cost. I love how they are saying they sent a message on the portal... yeah last month!

 

When I checked the tech forum meeting minutes there was a thing on there saying they were looking at alternatives to lightspeed... nothing about changing over so quickly.

 

OH WELL.... rip off that plaster eh?

[ticktock]

Actually just running through the setup now. It needs a PAC file, a certificate and an agent sending out. Creating the GPOs at the minute.

[Slum90]

We have been running Netsweeper in our school now for many years. We have this setup on a physical machine running linux for our gateway. Only last year we transitioned to the transparent proxy meaning all traffic on our main network has to go through this proxy.

It's not straight forward when starting new as you have to allow alot of Microsoft/Google URLs. Especially if you run Drive File Stream.

[TDupont992]

It has to be price, there aren't any areas imo in which Netsweeper beats out lightspeed. Lightspeed (I'm assuming Relay 2.0, not rocket) is imo, at the forefront of E-Safeguarding.

[Joanne]

We were on Rocket. Only time we've had problems was when JANET was being DDOS'ed. Oh and when the filter went down there wasn't a failover and everything was unfiltered! but I don't see that as a massive issue really.

[ticktock]

I was told the other week by a project manager at BTLS that we would get full support with Netsweeper and any problems would be sorted by their technical staff. The reality isn't so, I've been in contact with them and it's all the end users responsibility (google it and read the documentation, basically stop bothering us) unless of course you subscribe to their support. On another note Netsweeper does not support radius in the same way lightspeed did. You have to install an authentication portal on a DC and be really careful you don't over load with too many machines trying to authenticate or it might slow down??? This will be our last year with BTLS.

[SchoolsBroadband]

@ticktock

 

In the latest versions of netsweeper you dont have to do that for radius integration.

 

However I've no idea if or when btls will upgrade to that.

 

Dave

[browolf]

Is mobile device access any better with netsweeper? it's drives people round the bend having to authenticate every day sometimes multiple times on the lightspeed web portal.

[Joanne]

I have it set so that any unauthenticated devices get student filtering. I guess that's going to be the same for NetSweeper.

 

Got my date... 24th June at 4pm. YAY!

[caffrey]

I'm currently attempting to get radius working with Netsweeper, however with the appliance being hosted makes it incredibly difficult to troubleshoot - I don't have access to logs etc.

Netsweeper needs class, username and framedIP from the accounting and correct me if I'm wrong but NPS doesn't give out class. You can set Netsweeper up to not need it but being hosted makes this difficult

[Patrick]

Anyone know if we'll be using a transparent proxy, and if the default filtering is students to unknown users/devices?

 

Example, an iPad with no config other than being on the school wifi, would still have internet access and be treated as a student device/user?

[Joanne]

from the looks of all of the paperwork I've been reading.... no auth = block all. Which I don't like. Hopefully that's not the case.

 

OH WAIT.... there is IP filtering.... so yeah if it's on the range it will give you student filtering... silly me.

[Patrick]

Yeah that's what we want, then deploy an agent and filter via AD for my domain users.

[SimpleSi]

Head passed me email last week saying we were being migrated at 4pm 12Jun (yesterday) so came in to run the scripts on school laptops and setup ipads (no domain/MDM)

 

Came back in bright and early this morning to find that we still seem to be on Lightspeed filtering AFAICT

 

Contacted Help Desk- they say they have no record of us being migrated - sent them the email that we'd received saying it was being done - they've told us to email [email protected] and liaise with them directly

 

Sitting waiting .......

[Joanne]

Yeah if the head didn't reply to the education projects email they won't migrate you. My other school didn't reply and they haven't been swapped over (to my knowledge). The manual stuff for the iPads looks horrendous. I hope you don't have many to do!

[SimpleSi]

Yeah if the head didn't reply to the education projects email they won't migrate you.

I'm suspecting that this may be the case

 

10 Ipads - first one took 30 mins - got it down to to about 3 mins on the last one

Of course, I've probably got typos on the pac file address on several of them

 

And these are old Ipads so the certificate install instructions don't seem to 100% match up with options I've got available to me so they might not work at all!

[SimpleSi]

Yep just had email saying because head didn't reply - it didn't happen - they are going to reschedule

[Joanne]

I love how people don't read the emails

 

I had it forwarded to me and I replied, but also got the bursar to reply just incase my word wasn't good enough