Replacing Smoothwall

[Sheridan]

Even if I wanted to stay with smoothwall it’s hard work getting a reply from them these days. Such a shame but the customer service seems to have gone off a cliff.

[DGardiner]

Even if I wanted to stay with smoothwall it’s hard work getting a reply from them these days. Such a shame but the customer service seems to have gone off a cliff.

 

Find your account managers number, kick up a stink and see what you can get out of it - If theyre not meeting their SLA's, try and get some service credit?

 

 

Account manager explained its in hand and theyre changing things but training people takes time - Just need to hold them to account before renewals come along - The biggest thing that winds me up is they have time for engineers to onboard people for the other products and ive made my annoyance known at a few levels, a few people have said emailing the ceo gets results too

[ibpalle]

The majority of the onboardings for the new cloud products were actually done by a couple of contractors - easier to train up when it's just onboarding that needs to be done. We ended up having one stay with us permanently too.

[Securly_Marc]

Hey @Sheridan,

 

I know a few users have mentioned Securly as a potential replacement (Thank you all!)

 

If you want to look through a quick demo, let me know and we can send you over some times to schedule one.

 

All of our support and services are included free of charge to every customer and the SLA's are all Gold level.

 

Cheers,

 

Marc

[MartinT]

Sadly I have to agree about Smoothwall support, and I am a long time Smoothwall user going back 15 years.

 

We've had some issues recently and remote support always takes several days to initiate.

I spoke to Tim Larsen about upgrading to a VM version on 24 May and was promised a call by our account manager Holly Williams.

 

No contact so far.

 

The thing is, Smoothwall is still the best for safeguarding reporting and that's important for a school. I don't want to move to another solution that needs add-ins to fulfil the functions we need, but support is deteriorating.

[ibpalle]

I spoke to Tim Larsen about upgrading to a VM version on 24 May and was promised a call by our account manager Holly Williams.

 

I think that one is on me - I was looking through my mails and messages and can't see if I asked her to reach out. Could you PM me with the school name please?

Edited June 3, 2021 by ibpalle

[midweek]

We had a similar issue with our new S10, new drives made the world of difference. That and not using the management NIC for internet traffic.

 

We have an S10 that's 3 years old now on a 1Gbps line. Had a couple of freezes and connections drops but nothing serious. What issues present that upgrading the drives fixes just in case I'm missing something?

[TechMonkey]

We have an S10 that's 3 years old now on a 1Gbps line. Had a couple of freezes and connections drops but nothing serious. What issues present that upgrading the drives fixes just in case I'm missing something?

 

A batch of new hardware went out with drives that were under spec. It meant internet would hang for everyone if it got busy as the drives couldn't keep up so were a bottleneck. If your box is performing OK then yours is fine, ours happened about a year ago.

[Sheridan]

Is anyone using Sophos XG for web filtering and firewall? We've used smoothwall for years because the filtering was great but without support its not worth it anymore, we evaluated an old sophos UTM years ago and I seem to remember it was poor at picking up proxy avoidance sites at the time

[Jaan]

Is anyone using Sophos XG for web filtering and firewall? We've used smoothwall for years because the filtering was great but without support its not worth it anymore, we evaluated an old sophos UTM years ago and I seem to remember it was poor at picking up proxy avoidance sites at the time

 

We use a Sophos XG with firewall and web filtering here. Not had any issues with that. get a lot of hits against the little ones trying........

[altecsole]

Is anyone using Sophos XG for web filtering and firewall? We've used smoothwall for years because the filtering was great but without support its not worth it anymore, we evaluated an old sophos UTM years ago and I seem to remember it was poor at picking up proxy avoidance sites at the time

The web filter seems to be good, but is only as good as the category list that it updates from. We block site without a category (none), and that seems to work well. Plus, the application filter does a great job of detecting stuff - like BYOD devices trying to connect to VPNs (which we block).

 

Our approach is to give as much access as we can and then monitor and educate as required - it seems to work well and (most) pupils appreciate the responsibility.

[Sheridan]

Great, thanks I think Sophos XG is our preference at the moment. We'll be migrating the primaries off smoothwall as well but they'll only need smaller devices.

[Simcfc73]

I moved from Smoothwall to XG a couple of years ago and I am well chuffed.

 

It does take a bit of getting your head round the new terminology and the reporting is ok (whereas SW is abysmal) so I'd recommend getting fastvue.

 

Your welcome to pop over and have a look if you want.

[Wave9_Lee]

Great, thanks I think Sophos XG is our preference at the moment. We'll be migrating the primaries off smoothwall as well but they'll only need smaller devices.

 

Hi Sheridan, If you'd like any pricing, with or without deployment and support services, please drop me a PM or mail me anytime.

 

cheers

[Fredrico]

Anyone thinking of moving away from Smoothwall send an email to cancel the auto renewal, as they will sting you with it. its 90 days as well.

[TechBeard]

We moved to the Sophos XG as at the time I was really annoyed at Smoothwall because they changed to that daft “support allowance” system. And also wouldn’t let use our S8 box when renewing our license even though it was only a couple of months old (had been replaced under warranty).

 

Sophos gave us a great deal with a free appliance but I can honestly say it was the worst purchase decision I have ever made. The thing was a complete disaster, we spent months and months with issues. It wasn’t even as if we installed it wrong as we had Sophos professional services do the installation. It lacks some really basic features that the Smoothwall excels at. The website categorisation is pretty much worthless with most sites coming up as unclassified and so your unblock list is pretty huge as our students found “uncategorised” has all kinds of terrible stuff on it so we had to block at and manually unblock loads of sites. Chromebook Authentication implementation, forget about it, it’s dreadful. Custom url lists limited to 128 sites each, No safeguarding built in at all. Unblocking and blocking of sites is a massive pain as you have to use all the regex characters e.g

^([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?example\.com\.?/

 

 

The worst part is the dreadful support. Support in UK time is fed out of India which is no problem but in the experience we had you will be on hold for up to 3 hours at a time and then you will get put in an escalation queue which might take a few days. We went days without internet at times due to bugs in the firmware which meant the proxy engines kept refusing to restart. We went several months with our chromebooks not working properly and I spoke with over 5 sophos support agents who didn’t know what a Chromebook was. Sophos professional services did the firewall rules incredibly strict, as you would expect but everytime we had a problem getting an app or service through the firewall, support would just create a allow any any rule which would fix the problem, but kind of got rid of the whole point of the firewall! Sophos use 123rescue for their remote support. They could not get it to work though their own firewall, so they made a any any rule for my machine that I had to turn on when they wanted to remote in.

 

Our support experience was so bad that when I complained so much to the head of Sophos education they actually asked another 3rd party Sophos support company in the UK to help us out. They were really great and sorted the problem. They told me they only have a business because Sophos XG customers hate Sophos’ own support service so much. They also told me that when they install the XG that they don’t do it the way Sophos recommends as in their words, it doesn’t work for schools”.

 

Most recently we had basically no internet for a week as the authentication service kept breaking, I spent 8 hours on the phone with sophos and they couldn’t figure it out.

 

Once I found out Smoothwall had changed management and had changed it’s support quota system back to somethign sensible I contacted them, told them my predicament and they helped us out big time. We put it in a couple months ago and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

 

Personally, my biggest thing working in a school is safeguarding and the sophos gives me no confidence that it was being done correctly. I am sure in a business environment where web filtering is not the main concern, the sophos would be fine and I do think it’s firewall is perhaps more powerful than the Smoothwall in that regard, but for a school where you have to be 110% sure the students are protected against all the nasties, it’s a big failure.

 

If you do want to go with it I would recommend buying through the 3rd party sophos company and buying support from them, Wave9 I think they are called as they were really helpful, but would have worked out quite expensive to add on after the fact.

 

Happy to talk in more detail if you want a chat over the phone. There might be other schools who had a much better experience then me, but I can honestly say it’s been a disaster for us.