Tracing network/internet issues

[ABirch_BGS]

We had our 5th Parents Evening using the SchoolCloud system yesterday evening and we had the same issues. The previous 4 have all been fine. We have a 1GB link and our bandwidth reports are coming back fine with no other internet issues reported. I have contacted SchoolCloud. Looks like an issue at their end.

[howartp]

Smoothie only needs conditional forwarders to your dc for local Lookup, you can and should probably point at all the 8s or whatever for general resolving

 

Tom et al

 

Our LAN clients point at DCs which have forwarders to Smoothwall

Our Wifi clients point at Smoothwall

 

Smoothwall has conditional forwarders (in reverse notation) to the DCs for local lookup, and has OpenDNS for external lookup

 

Am I understanding that the DCs should point direct to (eg) OpenDNS?

 

And should I point our Wifi clients at the DCs to follow the same route, or leave Smoothwall handling them?

 

Our Smoothwall has been DNS and DHCP for wifi, to keep wifi off the LAN all together, but i'm wondering if I should scrap that ideology and have our DCs run DHCP for the wifi as well?

 

TIA

[tom_newton]

Tom et al

 

Our LAN clients point at DCs which have forwarders to Smoothwall

Our Wifi clients point at Smoothwall

 

Smoothwall has conditional forwarders (in reverse notation) to the DCs for local lookup, and has OpenDNS for external lookup

 

Am I understanding that the DCs should point direct to (eg) OpenDNS?

 

And should I point our Wifi clients at the DCs to follow the same route, or leave Smoothwall handling them?

 

Our Smoothwall has been DNS and DHCP for wifi, to keep wifi off the LAN all together, but i'm wondering if I should scrap that ideology and have our DCs run DHCP for the wifi as well?

 

TIA

 

This looks fine as-is to me. I'd sayyour DCs could, probably should go direct. There's no advantage in them using the smoothie. The only "interesting" bit is making sure the smoothie looks up your local stuff in your local AD, so we can rdns stuff, do AD binds, etc. but that's fine here. Smoothie will do a bit of DNS caching for you, but that's probably not super relevant.

[ssouth]

We had our first full session with around 25 teachers last night using SchoolCloud and the experience was terrible. We have a 200mbps connection which was hardly getting stressed (only using around 10-20Mbps). Our ISP reported no issues with the line or bandwidth. Our smoothwall box has been generally fine, though we are having the disks changed to faster ones shortly. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what the problem was, but it got so bad I couldn't even do a reliable ping to Google without it timing out constantly. Could it be that the Smoothwall box (an S8) just couldn't handle the number of video streams at once? I did see the resource usage go up to 20+ but it then settled down to below 10. The staff who went home and used SchoolCloud never had an issue. This morning everything is fine, countless chromebooks, laptops, pc's etc all connecting ok.

 

I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences, but we are at a loss to see where the issue is.

[mdrabble]

We had our first full session with around 25 teachers last night using SchoolCloud and the experience was terrible. We have a 200mbps connection which was hardly getting stressed (only using around 10-20Mbps). Our ISP reported no issues with the line or bandwidth. Our smoothwall box has been generally fine, though we are having the disks changed to faster ones shortly. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what the problem was, but it got so bad I couldn't even do a reliable ping to Google without it timing out constantly. Could it be that the Smoothwall box (an S8) just couldn't handle the number of video streams at once? I did see the resource usage go up to 20+ but it then settled down to below 10. The staff who went home and used SchoolCloud never had an issue. This morning everything is fine, countless chromebooks, laptops, pc's etc all connecting ok.

 

I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences, but we are at a loss to see where the issue is.

 

That sounds exactly like out issue with parents reporting to hardly hear staff in school were staff at home has no issues.

 

I replaced the drives in our S8 to SSD drives and with a 300MB connection, bandwidth was approx the same as yours.

 

Wondering if school cloud have a limit on number of current connections from a single IP?

[mavhc]

if the rest of the internet doesn't work during your sessions then it's not Schoolcloud's fault (99% likely)

 

Don't need to decrypt and inspect all the video streams, can you skip those on the firewall?