caffrey Posted November 20, 2019 Posted November 20, 2019 (edited) Just had a ERROR : Policy server connection failure for about 10 mins at the worst possible time.... seems to be working again for now I think it's broken policys for me, I have sites in a policy that are blocked, the sites in question were working before this problem , the site is listed in the local list for that policy Getting a bit fed up of this EDIT, and now the interface is running like Molasses Edited November 20, 2019 by caffrey 1
mproffitt1983 Posted November 20, 2019 Posted November 20, 2019 The console doesn't seem to like me navigating too much between policies and log viewer. Gets to the point where it is unresponsive. I'm forever unblocking services because SSL inspection is breaking ChromeOS signin and Cloudready activation. The Policy seems to apply one minute and not the next. I also find that global allows don't work that well - we have to add urls to each user group.
MrWu Posted November 20, 2019 Posted November 20, 2019 I’m getting very concerned here with Schools Broadband long term, I normally try to keep quiet on public forums but there are so many issues with the filter, plus NOC team still haven’t had our backup line working and tested since August, The test capture portal they promised to setup for BYOD for 3 weeks doesn’t work, daily issues with filter to the point I stop calling in because either first line team can’t get onto the portal either or they are not sure what’s going on...they do jump in once we post in forums or I complain to account manager via email, then they promised it will be fixed but to be honest nothing gets resolved. I went to Schools Broadband because we had below average service from my previous ISP... Senior management is asking me possible option of legal advice to terminate our contract earlier... it just shouldn’t come to this! 2
yac2016 Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 All I can say is they can't put the blame on Netsweeper, as we know its working ok on other broadband lines not through SchoolsBroadband. Nothing beats on prem firewall and filtering i'm afraid! 1
BrotherSidious Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 Getting very disillusioned here. We went for a managed service to reduce the time and effort our onsite techs would have to spend on this but for the last three days this is all two of them have been dealing with. The list of issues goes on. Inaccessible console, loss of filtering, contradicting information, lack of communication, inconsistencies, things stated but not sure if followed up. To be fair to David Tindall, if I message him on here I get a prompt response but he is not technical support and should not be our first line of support but there seem to be many customers exasperated with first line support and a general lack of communication. We have been moved without warning, were migrated without warning - they arbitrarily moved part of our network from Lightspeed to NetSweeper without telling us leaving our BYOD WiFi network dead in the water for three days. Personally, I can wait for a full and detailed report into the issues but I would like a daily update on progress so I at least have something to say to SLT rather than "I may have some information in due cause". SLT want answers as to why all of our Adobe products stopped working affecting the curriculum, why online resources we have paid for were suddenly unavailable for nearly two days again impacting the curriculum. Why finance suddenly could not make payments and why could our onsite caterers not order food in for the students meals. Complete nightmare and even though we are now back up (to a degree) we are still having to manually unblock sites which we had previously unblocked. All of this we hoped to avoid and why we choose managed rather than onsite but onsite is now looking like it would actually put less load on my department! 1
caffrey Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 I regret moving from on Prem now too, all problems are out of my hands now and it can get embarrasing 1
Griff Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 This is really worrying reading I am not with SB but its really not a good outlook. 3 years ago Schools Broadband had issues with Lightspeed it caused chaos they all blamed each other SB moved to Netsweeper and here we are again same fundamental problem schools are not getting the service they paid for. There is 1 constant in both these stories Schools Broadband. I am not sure where you all stand legally from getting out of these contracts but maybe its worth getting advice from https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/ or DFE. Is there anyway to club together as a collective to fight this as a group of schools. Maybe some other providers can offer some assistance in getting these guys onto a better service https://www.wave9.co.uk/ https://exa.net.uk https://www.exponential-e.com https://www.e2bn.org https://www.zen.co.uk https://www.opendium.com https://lynxnetworks.co.uk 4
caffrey Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 This is what I mean, I'm testing chromebooks and netsweeper is blocking a URL that is in the allow list (Stopping accounts logging in), at some random point during the day it'll start working Is this just me not knowing what I'm doing ? In my eyes from this, google.com is denied yet is in the allow list for the pupil web filtering policy
BrotherSidious Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 Hi, you may be experiencing the same issue that we were. SBB have a hidden shared list which blocks all of the decrypt urls except for the exceptions they have put in there so you will need to expressly allow it in one of your own lists. We have had to do the same for securesuite as the SBB hidden list was blocking our finance department from making purchases and transactions until we put an explicit allow for this in to one of our shared lists. We asked SBB and were told they would not amend their hidden list and if we wanted access to the site we would have to add in our own allow entry.
caffrey Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 (edited) That's the thing, I've got the URLs in a url\keyword local list for that policy group. *edit* and without me doing anything it just started working, it's random to when it's applied or not Edited November 21, 2019 by caffrey
mproffitt1983 Posted November 21, 2019 Posted November 21, 2019 We also have the same Chromebook issue. It will work sometimes and not others. Called today and they have added some sub domain urls that appears to have helped. Why you need to add sub domains when root domain is allowed is beyond me. Maybe something to do with hidden lists. We are now at a point where Chromebook signin works more often than not but it can be extremely slow. Feels like there are many policy lists involved here and they're all fighting to decide whether to allow or deny a request. I think more information about the actual setup of NetSweeper should have been provided to schools. 1
BrotherSidious Posted November 22, 2019 Posted November 22, 2019 I think more information about the actual setup of NetSweeper should have been provided to schools. Yes, good luck with that. 1
caffrey Posted November 22, 2019 Posted November 22, 2019 (edited) Yes it was Chromebooks I had issue with, logic implies adding sites to a local list would take precident over any internal hidden lists - seems like a bit of a gamble *edit* yep, Having issues with Chromebooks again - just randomly stopped working. Really frustrating Edited November 22, 2019 by caffrey
mproffitt1983 Posted November 22, 2019 Posted November 22, 2019 Thankfully we are only configuring chromebooks for a primary school on our site, we don't actually use them ourselves - this would have been a big issue otherwise. We have the following URLs unblocked to allow Croudready activation, Google sign-in and also QR sign-in. Hopefully these are helpful to others here: android.clients.google.com mtalk.google.com gvt2.com gvt3.com hangouts.google.com accounts.google.co.uk accounts.google.com bootstrapcdn.com clever.com neverware.com assets.clever.com samlidp.clever.com maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com alt2-mtalk.google.com alt5-mtalk.google.com alt8-mtalk.google.com android.clients.google.com beacons.gvt2.com beacons3.gvt2.com beacons4.gvt2.com beacons5.gvt2.com beacons5.gvt3.com crl.pki.goog/GTSGIAG3.crl mtalk.google.com - - - Updated - - - 1
caffrey Posted November 22, 2019 Posted November 22, 2019 (edited) Working again now with no intervention on my part... I know when it starts working as I start getting gmail notifications on my phone...... Edited November 22, 2019 by caffrey
Primus Posted November 22, 2019 Posted November 22, 2019 It's a top quality service from a forum sponsor! It's also excellent how they've posted in this thread and kept everyone up to date on their obvious issues... 1
SchoolsBroadband Posted November 25, 2019 Posted November 25, 2019 Hello everyone, official communications will be sent via the normal channels soon. On Thursday evening Netsweeper installed a significant patch which has brought back stability to the Webadmin. This was mainly a major reconfiguraton of MY-SQL although numerous patches have been made to NS Proxy as well as a new design for Wagent off loading to alternate servers implemented. It has taken Netsweeper a significant amount of time and effort to find the underlying issuing but they have been working very hard and have finally done so. We certainly thank them for working as hard as they have trying to get back to where we were previously. To be clear, this has not been an issue with Schools Broadbands hardware or our load balanced platform. This has a huge amount of capacity available in hardware and throughput as we are nowhere near touching as far as this can go. Nobody (including Netsweeper) have been happy at the amount of time it's taken to get to the bottom of the issue and there have been lessons learnt as well as an apology from both of our companies. Although the issue hasn't affected all of ours customers, one affected customer is one too many. We may put together a technical webinar for those of our customers that wish to understand the technical intracicies of what happened and how everything was fixed if there is demand. The issues raised were not total outages of our solution but generally small periods of instability or features not working in full due to a knock on effect of the primary issue with the Wedamin. We are currently continuing to monitor the Netsweeper platform before both Netsweeper and Schools Broadband sign off that the fix has 100% worked and will update our customers in due course. Thank you all for your patience. If you've any specific questions please send me a PM. Thanks Dave 3
Primus Posted November 25, 2019 Posted November 25, 2019 To be clear, this has not been an issue with Schools Broadbands hardware or our load balanced platform. This has a huge amount of capacity available in hardware and throughput as we are nowhere near touching as far as this can go. No, no, it never is - it's either LightSpeed or Netsweeper isn't it?... Heaven forbid it should be an issue with Schools Broadband. 3
Edu-IT Posted November 25, 2019 Posted November 25, 2019 No, no, it never is - it's either LightSpeed or Netsweeper isn't it?... Heaven forbid it should be an issue with Schools Broadband. Not saying the service is acceptable but if a patch applied to Netsweeper has resolved this, doesn’t it suggest it’s Netsweeper? If it wasn’t their issue why would they have given it so much time and effort and not just passed it back to SB? 1
snagrat Posted November 25, 2019 Author Posted November 25, 2019 It would be good to get this confirmed by Netsweeper. Are they active on this forum? 1
SchoolsBroadband Posted November 25, 2019 Posted November 25, 2019 Their UK sales director was on here but he has recently left ans gone back to Bermuda of all places where he was originally from. I'll ask our new account manager or some of the tops guys in Canada. Dave
Primus Posted November 25, 2019 Posted November 25, 2019 Not saying the service is acceptable but if a patch applied to Netsweeper has resolved this, doesn’t it suggest it’s Netsweeper? If it wasn’t their issue why would they have given it so much time and effort and not just passed it back to SB? It's funny - LightSpeed never seemed to have the issues elsewhere that SB blamed on them. Then SB moved to Netsweeper and oh would you look at that it now has issues as well - knock me down with a feather! In fact, if you remember, LS emailed people directly to defend themselves in the end which sparked quite a stir at the time with lots of members defending SB. 2
yac2016 Posted November 25, 2019 Posted November 25, 2019 Netsweeper have not had issues on other platforms recently apart from schoolsBB. 3
caffrey Posted November 26, 2019 Posted November 26, 2019 (edited) I've never been so frustrated with a product, I would never recommend it - if I could dump it I would Edited November 26, 2019 by caffrey 2
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