Ruth Miskin New Video Domain

[JonnyAlpha]

Hi,

We have recently moved to Smoothwall from RM Educations Filtering and Firewall. Our school uses Ruth Miskin’s Phonics Videos, which are hosted in Vimeo. The appropriate URLs were whitelisted a long while ago.

Now that we have move to Smoothwall we need to get these videos working again, however the teacher who is the RWI Admin sent me an email quoting a message that she had received when logging into the Ruth Miskin School Portal. It stated that all RWI videos have been moved to a new domain:

player.ruthmiskin.vimeo.work

And that all that is needed now is for that single domain to be white listed.

 

Has anyone else seen this and made the change?

Did it work?

 

Many thanks

[Oaktech]

Yes, and Yes. You can't access anything you shouldn't from it.

[JonnyAlpha]

So, we set the domain that we had been given from Ruth Miskin in Smoothwall as an allowed category and low and behold videos still did not load.

I raised the issue with Smoothwall, who remoted into my Laptop and identified 4 more domains that needed to be whitelisted to get this working.

 

 

[snagrat]

Is allowing vimeocdn.com a good idea? Wouldn’t this enable any videos hosted on the CDN to play?

[PaddyNewman]

Exactly snagrat, using a Referrer URL is the way. 

Edited March 23, 2025 by PaddyNewman

[sigma]

I think you actually need "f.vimeocdn.com" which is the vimeo player scrips host rather than "vimeocdn.com" which also includes "unwanted content" if you wanted to really tie it down specifically.

 

[Oaktech]

I'm just going to go back and check what we have allowed, because unless there are duplicate allow rules hidden away in another more general policy, all I've allowed is the one domain stated by Ruth Miskin and removed all of our other attempts to get it to work just for staff. 🤔

[JonnyAlpha]

On 22/03/2025 at 22:58, snagrat said:

Is allowing vimeocdn.com a good idea? Wouldn’t this enable any videos hosted on the CDN to play?

 

These are the domains that Smoothwall tech support have identified that need to be unblocked to resolve the issue. Is there a Smoothwall rep on here that can clarify this, as I would assume that as they are responsible for filtering, they would not allow a potentially inappropriate url to be allowed?

 

I may refer this back to my IT Support team 

[JonnyAlpha]

On 22/03/2025 at 22:58, snagrat said:

Is allowing vimeocdn.com a good idea? Wouldn’t this enable any videos hosted on the CDN to play?

Also what is the CDN?

[snagrat]

35 minutes ago, JonnyAlpha said:

Also what is the CDN?

Content delivery network 

[PaddyNewman]

I would assume the Smoothwall supports referrer header, it seems to support most things. That does away with allowing loads of URLs, if it comes from ruthmiskin.com etc, it allows the content. You might need some cool bits to make it work but we certainly don't suggest people allow the URLs specifically. 

[sigma]

I have never thought there was a problem allowing the architecture hosts ( which tend to be more constant), as distinct from the content (which tends to be more dynamic), per se.  
 

I use referrer headers all the time, but then you still often need to exclude the ads and trackers, as per KCSIE. I think it depends on the individual site structure as to the optimal way to achieve this. 
 

 

[sigma]

2 hours ago, JonnyAlpha said:

 

These are the domains that Smoothwall tech support have identified that need to be unblocked to resolve the issue. Is there a Smoothwall rep on here that can clarify this, as I would assume that as they are responsible for filtering, they would not allow a potentially inappropriate url to be allowed?

 

I may refer this back to my IT Support team 

If I were the Smoothwall engineer, I could argue that (assuming it is) the Vimeo open player was still blocked, even if all the content on vimeocdn.com was allowed.  
 

Ruth Miskin’s site appears to be locked to only her videos.  However should a pupil navigate to any other accessible site that hosts their videos on Vimeo, their video content would play “unfiltered”.