Smoothwall Opinions?

[talksr]

Hi there,

We are an LGfL School. The head needs detailed monthly logs of internet activity for safeguarding.

We have always run these though Webscreen but they are not very easy for a normal person to understand and interpret.

I have contacted LGfL to see if there are any better ways to display this info and they tell me that there are things in the pipeline with the introduction of SchoolProtect.

 

The head isn't wanting to wait for this and said she needs something that can give a better overview of what is going on.

We have looked at Smoothwall and wondered if anyone has any experiences or opinions on this and its implementation.

 

 

An example would be, one of the LGfL reports shows top 50 denied categories for the month. We couldn't make it any bigger as the report just kept crashing. P0rn was one which showed 157 times. There was no way to view more on this. I had to log a case, as if I tried to do a detailed report, there was no P0rn category, apparently it comes under Adult. We need something that normal users can quickly and easily open and view without all of this faffing around. The head wants to see which websites were accessed for a said category, at what time, and if poss the hostname of the system as IP addresses are not that helpful. For this example, every request was not to a standard URL but an IP so I expect we have a system with some rouge software on.

 

Would this be a suitable replacement and how does that work in conjunction with Webscreen/LGfL?

 

Thanks in advance

[Aprice]

Most of our customers are with Smoothwall at the moment, which has worked well however the reporting aspect I think needs significant improvement. The instant alerts via email went down very well with some of our heads.

 

Since the KCISE changes we've partnered with Content Keeper and are much more impressed with its reporting functionality.

 

I'm very glad to have now got rid of Netsweeper and ISP provided filtering solutions across all of our customers.

[talksr]

Most of our customers are with Smoothwall at the moment, which has worked well however the reporting aspect I think needs significant improvement. The instant alerts via email went down very well with some of our heads.

 

Since the KCISE changes we've partnered with Content Keeper and are much more impressed with its reporting functionality.

 

I'm very glad to have now got rid of Netsweeper and ISP provided filtering solutions across all of our customers.

 

Thank you, very helpful. We are already a Impero Customer so I will check this out as had not even thought to consider Impero.

[gszech]

Hi there,

We are an LGfL School. The head needs detailed monthly logs of internet activity for safeguarding.

We have always run these though Webscreen but they are not very easy for a normal person to understand and interpret.

I have contacted LGfL to see if there are any better ways to display this info and they tell me that there are things in the pipeline with the introduction of SchoolProtect.

 

The head isn't wanting to wait for this and said she needs something that can give a better overview of what is going on.

We have looked at Smoothwall and wondered if anyone has any experiences or opinions on this and its implementation.

 

 

An example would be, one of the LGfL reports shows top 50 denied categories for the month. We couldn't make it any bigger as the report just kept crashing. P0rn was one which showed 157 times. There was no way to view more on this. I had to log a case, as if I tried to do a detailed report, there was no P0rn category, apparently it comes under Adult. We need something that normal users can quickly and easily open and view without all of this faffing around. The head wants to see which websites were accessed for a said category, at what time, and if poss the hostname of the system as IP addresses are not that helpful. For this example, every request was not to a standard URL but an IP so I expect we have a system with some rouge software on.

 

Would this be a suitable replacement and how does that work in conjunction with Webscreen/LGfL?

 

Thanks in advance

 

We moved away from Smoothwall as the reports were just too hard to read. We are using Securly now across all our schools.

[kennysarmy]

We moved away from Smoothwall as the reports were just too hard to read. We are using Securly now across all our schools.

 

Are your students able to do this?

https://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/236499-securly-allows-students-access-youtube-embedding-vidoes-powerpoint.html

[gszech]

Are your students able to do this?

https://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/236499-securly-allows-students-access-youtube-embedding-vidoes-powerpoint.html

Would love to help but our school is using mainly Chromebooks and our secondary phase pupils can access YouTube (strict acces).

My suggestion is to block YouTube with another product like GPO policies or Antivirus admin panel like Sophos or whatever you are using AV to block youtube.com

 

This is a long shot, but in Custom Policies can you add a rule to block: hubblecontent.osi.office.net for pupils and allow the same link for staff?

[talksr]

Hi all,

Just a quick update on this to say, I presented all of the info from this thread. The head decided to go with Smoothwall as she knows other heads who use it and I have got to say, it has worked really well so far. It is running across M365, local AD, Lightspeed MDM for iPads and Google Chrome.

 

So far, no issues, it seems really good. Just thought I would let you all know. Many thanks for your helpful advice on this.

[gaz350b]

As mentioned in this thread smooth wall instant alerts are very good and we’ve found cloud filter in hybrid mode to be very good aswell, Especially getting all those pesky game sites that use sooooo many tricks to bypass web filters.

 

I also think Smoothwall reports need a bit of development focus as there is a lot of noise that gets generated in the background these days.

There almost needs to be a filter to reduce the noise in reports but I suspect a lot of their effort is going into the cloud filter and improving the functions in that.

 

For 99% of our needs we find alerts to be sufficient but then again we don’t have half the problems others school might have with regards to behaviour issues.

Edited April 30, 2024 by gaz350b

[tom_newton]

Our cloud based reporting system is getting a lot of work - if you are not using it, pm me and I will get you access