Smoothwall Newbie Advice

[PrimaryNetMan]

Background: I am currently supporting a school ad-hoc with IT support while they are going through the process of joining our MAT and one of their biggest current issues is with internet performance.

 

They currently have an etherway based connectivity and a Smoothwall appliance (HP Gen 9 Server) and this is my first experience with Smoothwall.

 

Speed test results vary wildly. from 80/30 on the first run to 10/1 on a second for example, just not consistent.

 

Also apparently, when using Google meet, it will just drop out after 12minutes, almost on queue.

 

Looking at the admin console the Smoothwall swap file is maxing out 7.2GB / 8GB. Memory usage is around 4GB /16GB

 

It is running Leeds 47 and an update available is version is 68!

 

Any suggestion from the Smoothwall experts? Would updating to v68 cure these issues?

 

Thanks in advance.

[simpsonj]

I would imagine Smoothwall support wouldn't help until it's updated to the latest version, which may help the problem anyhow.

 

As a comparison, at a site with over 700 clients, my swap file is 9728 / 7,998460 so that definitely looks like that's an issue! RAM usage is about the same (4GB / 32GB)

[dmj]

I wouldn't pay too much attention to the amount of swap space used. Pages aren't removed from swap/memory unless they are needed.

It's probably been just been running a long while.

[PrimaryNetMan]

Thanks for the replies so far.

 

Any gotchas when upgrading a Smoothwall?

[3s-gtech]

Not really. It should just work. Ours stopped updating, and needed their intervention - but the Smoothwall can potentially block it's own update site.

 

Take a config backup, get it updated, and the restarts it does along the way should help. Swaps on ours hovers a LOT lower than yours - this can hammer device speed as it fills up, but it should be freeing up as you have plenty of RAM free.