Policy Central Professional Entrprise Forensic Software hell

[tosca925]

H as any one else running or installed this PCE We have had it running now for over two weeks and i have had more complaints in these two weeks than the 4 years i have worked here.

 

First it stops Dreamweaver2004 running, when launched it just shuts down and it also crashes when you design sites. It has caused chaos with Smartboard version 8 and 9 with it no longer recognizing the pens and also not letting us orientate the board. I have had complaints of dial up internet access on staff laptops at hoe now playing up. I have just had a complaint that when a staff laptop is used at home Real player will no longer play radio or video files from the BBC.

 

IS any one else using this pile of crap. The company have admitted there is a problem with Dreamweaver but nothing else, i have a meeting tomorrow with one of the developers to talk about the problems.

 

Feedback please please.

 

Its installed on over 750 clients of which 160 are staff laptops and our phone is red hot all day.

[stevenlong1985]

:S Link2ICT want to come over Next week and install it. Not too sure now from what your saying :S:S

[cookie_monster]

We had a trial (it was a couple of years ago) and it looked great when demoed but when we rolled it out in a suite we went off the idea, it didn't have a way to roll out the client back then and on top of that there was a few niggles so we didn't bother.

[tech_guy]

Are you with the Warwickshire LEA? We had it installed over a year ago and now we can't live without it. We had a few weeks of teething troubles initially - slowing down the internet/network, not allowing sites to laod, etc - but once those issues were ironed out we've not looked back since.

 

We use DreamWeaver MX 2004 and have experienced no problems along the lines of those you have.

[jamin100]

:S Link2ICT want to come over Next week and install it. Not too sure now from what your saying :S:S

 

I installed it a few weeks ago myself (dont trust link2ICT to touch our servers...

 

I have 60 toshiba a200 laptops all identical built with the same image. I installed PCE on 30 of them and it stopped the internet working on them. The only way to get it back was to uninstall PCE.

 

Spoke to link2ICT (urgh) and was told that it was because we were still a full proxy school... When i told them that i have a dozen workstations with PCE installed and no problem they got confused!!!

[Mr_Andy]

I think it is the cause of quite a few stupid things going on here.

The curriculum server has stopped allowing remote access and occasionally drops connection full stop since it's been in place. Over the last couple of weeks people have intermittently had no desktop loaded despite the restart which used to solve it.. it's all just very weird.

 

Also think it's interfering with the wireless controller too but unfortunately PCE was installed the same time as Amber came in to sort the school infrastructure project, so the problem is hard to pinpoint precisely.

 

It's coming off tomorrow to see if the problems are solved, but I'd most definitely look into another monitoring software/hardware solution.

Edited July 15, 2008 by Mr_Andy

[jamin100]

I managed to get it working fine and (touch wood) its been working here ok for the last few weeks. I firstly removed the client from every machine on the network and also destroyed the installation on the server including the SQL database.

 

I then installed the server software including sql from scratch and initiated a update to which it found and downloaded the newest version from the web.

 

Then I manually installed it on each client machine and it seems to be going ok..

 

for now . . ..

[BrotherSidious]

Currently experiencing issues with IE crashing (Debug error) but they have been helpful in trying to assist us with our issues. Not experinced the Dreamweaver issue.

 

It doesn't crash IE all the time and when it is working it is proving very effective in conjuntion with our AUP.

 

HOWEVER, we have been experiencing various issues since its install (March 2008) and although the comapny works hard to address our issues when raised, I would say it has not yet worked reliably and been stable at this point.

[markwilliamson2001]

We had trialed this as well. When Demo'd it was good, but then when we trialled it, it was C**P!! We had another system running alongside, which an ICT Teacher had written to monitor web-usage (which works perfectly).

 

We had problems installing the client with the provided MSI, (which were eventually resolved, after 3 weeks of trying).

 

PCE did not write data back to the server properly, but did it in 15 minute sessions (wtf, so if a student uses a computer for less than this time, nothing got recorded).

 

It also seemed to miss large chunks of data recording for no apparent reason either!

 

In the end, it just died a death, and we stuck with our own Chasemon system!

 

Regards

Mark

[BrotherSidious]

To this day we have not had an acceptable MSI install so we are deploying manually (at least that way it installs ok).

 

Regarding the 15 minutes we discovered this during testing when it appeared not to be capturing anything during a quick 5 minute test. We were advised that it does this to prevent constant network traffic and batches up the captures and then sends them. We were told that there is also a capture threshold (can't remember value) but if this is exceeded it will send more regulalrly. Obviously this leaves a risk of missed captures but is does this to reduce network load.

 

I am not saying the above is acceptable, merely adding to the info posted above.

 

We also had issues with Symanted Antivirus 10 (not End Point Protection) where PCE kept triggering the Anti-Tamper protection. We had to turn the AV Anti-tamper protection off to stop this as there is only a global on/off option. Apparantly in End Point protection you can selectively turn Anti-tamper protection off for specific things i.e. Policy Central so it would be less of an issue. Unfortunately, at present due to some legacy classroom management software that is incompatible with End Point protection we cannot make use of this option.

 

Despite the negative aspects and current limited deployment here (as we are still testing to eradicate the IE debug errors in conjunction with Forensic) we are getting some useful information captured. A number of pupils have been pulled up over AUP violations and word is spreading that pupils are being caught more often and AUP violations is slightly decreased in the areas we are monitoring. It has also captured some chat type information that has been passed to pastoral which we would otherwise not have known about. Due to this we are sticking with it in the hope that the issues will be ironed out.

 

As such, I am not endorsing the product as present but we will continue to work with Forensic to see if our issues can be resolved. We feel there is some potential in the product and due to this we are, at the moment, willing to spend more time working with Forensic to get our issues resolved. Time will tell!

Edited October 1, 2008 by BrotherSidious

[alan-d]

We have it installed but it's not in full use yet. It seems to be working on all the PCs OK - we do have the IE Explorer crash but that was happening on PCs that didn't have PCE installed yet so I can't blame that.

 

I now have it rolled out to all curriculum machines and in active mode for years 12 and 13. The rest of the school it is still running in stealth mode.

 

Sorting out the false positives is time consuming at the moment as everything is reported to me. It's not perfect yet but so far it does what it's supposed to do.

 

Forgot to add - we use the MSI provided which seems to be working fine. Deployed via GPO, not the PCE deployment tool.

[BrotherSidious]

We are currenlty attirbuting debug errors to Policy Central as we can reproduce the debug errors quite regulalry (browsing the HBOS website). However, if we kill the PCE process it stops debugging. The same is true of slow page loading, as soon as we kill the PCE process page loading speeds up (checked by visiting the same pages with it on and off).

 

I'm not saying PCE is the definite cause of the issue but it is interacting with something such that when PCEis installed and running the debug errors manifest themselves.

[stevenlong1985]

Hi

 

Would anyone recommend getting the Policy Central Enterprise installed on the network?

 

Thanks in advance

[jamin100]

Well it works and it does what it says.

I havnt had any issues with it over the past few months so I suspect that they have now fixed any bugs that were there.

 

Sorting out the false positives is a pain though

[mrforgetful]

I would.

 

I mean sure it takes nearly 2000 screenshots a day, but some are really useful for capturing the little people and having some great evidence they can't deny.

 

Great for finding proxy sites too if you set it to get the correct words.

 

It rolls out easily to every computer you want it to, never had any performance issues. You can even assign groups (such as Year 7) to be monitored by a certain staff member (Head of Year) if you don't want to go through it all yourself.

[alan-d]

So far I've found the benefits far outweigh any niggles you come across.

[elloyd69]

We're running policy central and their website says you can exclude specific websites from scanning at group level, but I have so far failed to find how to do this (I'm having a 'blonde' day!!)

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

It's working well for us so far, apart from the massive amount of captures that need wading through. Some of them have been very interesting!! Kids are funny!

 

Thanks

[alan-d]

Click on a group, click on the Internet Tab, add the site you want to allow and save. If you want the site accessible globally then highlight it in the list and click Global and save.

 

After a while you may find it easier to have different lists stored as text files for different groups. The same goes for blocking sites.

[elloyd69]

Yeah, I've done that but the problem is the PCE website says you can exclude specific websites (e.g. Samlearning) from scanning because of the inordinate amount of hits they get due to language used. So I have added the allowed sites to the list but it is still scanning and I'm still getting hits from those sites.

 

Thanks though.

[mrforgetful]

I know what you mean.

 

In PCE go to PCE Control Settings tab

Click on Internet Control

Click the URLs To Be Excluded button

Enter the sites in here.

[alan-d]

Have a look in the blocked sites list. I had a problem where BBC Bitesize was being blocked and BBC Games was in the blocked list. Once I removed BBC Games from the blocked list BBC Bitesize was available. I haven't looked at the reasons why that happens yet, it's on my 'To Do' list.

[elloyd69]

Thats what I've done but I'm still getting hits from those sites......ARGH!!

[elloyd69]

I am trying to block http addresses on policy central as the kids have found how to get to youtube using the IP address but it's not letting me do it. I'm still getting a lot of hits but it's slowly diminishing.

[elloyd69]

Worryingly I'm replying to my own posts now!! Sorted the IP address problem a different way. Still can exclude certain sites from capture although they seem to be excluded from reports. Have contacted policy central but so far no response.

[Wils86]

we use PCE and except for one or two update problems moving to the new version ( which were all sorted out) I love it lol For the ip addresses in the block list type

*208.65.153.238* and any other youtube ip addresses, I've got about 5 ips in all.

 

Use the * as wildcards to block sites, and you dont need to putt Http:// blah blah blah. I just put stuff like *game*, Seperate groups for staff as well.

 

Hope thats a little helpful.