Smoothwall: From Hero’s to Zero

[chrisjako]

I’m at breaking point with this company, before they joined Qoria I was a real advocate, even recommending them to our LA of whom took them on for a lot a Bradford school and things ran virtually seamless for a decade.

 

Fast forward to three years ago, we joined a MAT of 19 schools and smoothwall won our tender to join them all together with a central management smoothwall parent and child box structure.

 

Its an absolute pile of horse manure, I’ve had issues right from the start of them sending faulty s1 boxes, post installation we had 5 boxes hacked due to their install team leaving the password as default and they had the audacity to blame me for not checking them all post their technical install handover!

 

We where promised cloud filter from the start and due to a series of mismanagement on their side we only got it working a month ago, when I say working, it randomly blocks internet traffic across multiple sites sporadically causing the PC to look like they are running slow, we had to set an intune policy to test roll out inprivate so we could bypass cloud filter and voila it works, I am being made out by them to not know what I am doing when apparently they have 100s of customer uses cloud filter successfully only to be told by another technician that we where incorrectly informed about secret knock configuration and they further information about setting custom DNS records was released to us after that didn’t work on the child boxes.

 

Their teams and our account manager take ages to respond.

 

Don’t get me wrong there are a few gems in support but getting a hold of them is like trying to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

 

You spend more time logging a ticket then you do troubleshooting it with support.

 

These things are just the tip of the iceberg!

 

My team supports other schools outside our Trust and one uses Exa and surf protect, I called them several times to troubleshoot firewall ports for a new SIP system, EXA support answered the phone straight away, no need to raise a ticket, one stayed on the phone for 30 mins with me whilst we finished testing, this was way past 6pm too.

 

I know they are a sponsor here and seem to get well protected whenever a ‘smoothwall issue’ post is made but I honestly don’t care, this company has been an absolute disaster for MAT and I can’t wait to rip this crap out once our contract ends

[tom_newton]

Chris,

I know we have not been where we would like to be with you guys - I know your troubles, and yes, many of them were caused by us dropping the ball, sometimes more than once. Can't blame you for your frustrations, but I know the team is working to fix em.

 

I should add that we do NOT get preferential treatment on here. We have not asked for posts to be taken down except in, as I recall, one incredibly exceptional situation. I (really, honestly) appreciate it when people vent any frustrations, as (usually) it means I can go do something to help.

Edited July 3, 2024 by tom_newton

[Aprice]

I do think support is starting to improve again. We've just started rolling cloud filter out, so far it's been OK, only issue was knocking out developer tools caused some issues with an application we're using that uses edge in the background. Thankfully we've been using them for years so support requests we generally do log are fairly few. Recently had an hour long call with a really good engineer troubleshooting a really odd issue that was affecting the whole site's internet (long story short it was DNS, returning different names to the name on website certificates). As it was a whole site down they did get back to us really quickly and was left happy at the end of it.

 

For filtering in edu, I do think Smoothwall probably is the most comprehensive solution, a lot of the others are really solid firewalls with bolt on filtering that's more designed for enterprise. I don't really consider Smoothwall a next-gen firewall but it is a fairly solid filter. We've looked at other products lately, but a lot don't do content filtering on the fly like Smoothwall does so solely rely on blocklists. Anything uncategorised is just blocked or allowed depending on which you choose.

 

The secret knock function I quite like, knowing that if a device hasn't got the agent on it won't just get unfiltered internet.

Edited July 3, 2024 by Aprice

[ssouth]

Chris,

I know we have not been where we would like to be with you guys - I know your troubles, and yes, many of them were caused by us dropping the ball, sometimes more than once. Can't blame you for your frustrations, but I know the team is working to fix em.

 

I should add that we do NOT get preferential treatment on here. We have not asked for posts to be taken down except in, as I recall, one incredibly exceptional situation. I (really, honestly) appreciate it when people vent any frustrations, as (usually) it means I can go do something to help.

 

Cloud filter is also a total nighmare for us - I've just put a post on edugeek.

 

If anyone can get this working properly, that would be great. For us it just "falls over" once we have a few hundred students using their own chromebooks.

[tom_newton]

I'm sure we will get that solved -does sound very unusual.

Hope folks have had a pretty decent experience with support so far? From this side, things have felt better than in prior years

[synaesthesia]

My experience has been quite decent since we had ours fitted in October. Had a few reasons to contact and responses have always been timely. Cloud filter also in use as a hybrid for around 120 chromebooks with no issue. I've experienced the poorer side of their support a couple of years ago but it has certainly improved.

[ssouth]

My experience has been quite decent since we had ours fitted in October. Had a few reasons to contact and responses have always been timely. Cloud filter also in use as a hybrid for around 120 chromebooks with no issue. I've experienced the poorer side of their support a couple of years ago but it has certainly improved.

 

We are fine with anything up to 250+ its when we get above that, that the fun starts.

[kennysarmy]

Our experience with Cloud filter was that it removed all the rules from our on-premise device and left students able to view all kinds of websites they should not have been able to.

 

As you can imagine, I've been put off looking at it for a while.

[tom_newton]

Our experience with Cloud filter was that it removed all the rules from our on-premise device and left students able to view all kinds of websites they should not have been able to.

 

As you can imagine, I've been put off looking at it for a while.

 

We did have a few teething troubles with some customers - largely due to our desire to keep on-prem and cloud in sync. While the support team have been rebuilding themselves, in product we have also improved checks and safeguards!