Student needs to use Glucose Monitor thru WiFi

[fiza]

We have a couple of students who have Glucose Monitors that constantly monitor their Glucose levels and then transmit this info via their phones to their parents.

We connect the phone to the WiFi and data gets through but the parent is saying after the initial data it then loses connection. If the data is being transmitted initially that would mean that the WiFi and School systems are letting the data through and it is not getting blocked. Don't understand why it would then stop working during the day.

 

Anyone have any students that use these systems? One of the manufacturers is Dexcom.

Does it work in your School?

[strawberry]

Is there an option in the app to manually transmit? Could it be the power settings on the phone? I've had some in the past that wouldn't use wifi when the screen was off.

[Chaniel]

We have about 7 or so students with Dexcom glucose monitors now.

For the students who have Dexcom devices, we connect their phones to the wireless and have set dexcom.com to "Do not filter" in Smoothwall. Haven't had any reports that it isn't working so far, from what I could tell it is just supposed to upload via port 443 to *.dexcom.com.

 

I'd look at firewall/proxy logs for the student devices to see if it's dropping anything, or if it's something to do with the power settings as above. On Android there are certain sleep settings that can disable background processing etc.

[fiza]

Is there an option in the app to manually transmit? Could it be the power settings on the phone? I've had some in the past that wouldn't use wifi when the screen was off.

 

I suggested this to the parent but was told that even at night when the child is asleep the phone is transmitting so it cant be affected by the screen going off.

[fiza]

We have about 7 or so students with Dexcom glucose monitors now.

For the students who have Dexcom devices, we connect their phones to the wireless and have set dexcom.com to "Do not filter" in Smoothwall. Haven't had any reports that it isn't working so far, from what I could tell it is just supposed to upload via port 443 to *.dexcom.com.

 

I'd look at firewall/proxy logs for the student devices to see if it's dropping anything, or if it's something to do with the power settings as above. On Android there are certain sleep settings that can disable background processing etc.

 

We have Smoothwall too and have put dexcom.com into Custom allow and it does go through. The bit that doesn't make sense is that the parent says it stops working. If it was firewall or Smoothwall blocking it then nothing would get through surely?

[KevinB]

We found that in addition to allowing dexcom.com through filtering we also had to add a firewall rule allowing access to an IP address that we obtained from Dexcom support as the phone was trying to use a non-web port.

[Ex-MGSTech]

Are there any login session limits on your WiFi system?

[pete]

I assume swapping to 4G updates the parent's dashboard immediately and consistently through the day? But student phones are by default on BYOD and so favour WiFi?

 

 

Does running a packet capture on the Smoothwall (SSH in, tcpdump -i any host PHONEIPADDRESS -s 0 -w /tmp/glucosemon-date.pcap), running the app on the phone for a few minutes and then sftp the .pcap file to a desktop and look through in wireshark) shed any light on it?

 

We've had a few things (looking at you eSafe) cause Smoothwall to choke in ways only really visible from a packet capture. SW support were* happy to walk customers through doing it the first time.

 

 

*many years ago, policies may have changed.

[JordanT91]

We've had a few issues in the past. In the end we told the parents that they were welcome to use our WiFi but it could not be relied upon for a reliable connection (we have semi-regular broadband dropouts) and that they'd have to provide their own internet connection, so that's what they do now.

[fiza]

The parents have reluctantly accepted that we have done all we can. Whilst on site the student is in a safe environment and there are many staff on hand to help if an incident occurred.

 

Thanks for all your suggestions everyone.