katem Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 Hi I've seen the announcement on the EMBC login page, but is anyone else still suffering with a really poor service? My station isn't filtered but am still having problems accessing the most basic of sites Kate
sparkeh Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 Yes there appears to be a poor service at the moment. The most common issue for us is sites being redirected to the portal login page. 1
katem Posted October 1, 2008 Author Posted October 1, 2008 Yes there appears to be a poor service at the moment. The most common issue for us is sites being redirected to the portal login page. Goodo, at least i know its not just me then! thought i'd buggered up the filtering! thanks sparkeh
sparkeh Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 No worries. Here is current update from Synetrix 01/10/2008 11:52:18 - EMBC - Internet Browsing Issues 01/10/08 11.51 Investigation work into this incident is progressing. We have narrowed down the fault domain to SSO and Policy server interaction. Testing is taking place now to identify the root cause and determine a resolution. 01/10/08 09.57 Pages redirecting to the EMBC portal has reoccurred again this morning. Engineers are investigating further into the fault.
rush_tech Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 I don't think its been working fully since the start of term:censored: Thet seem to fix one problem to cause another On the talk2synetrix site the core network light has been yellow for 4 weeks
TimTech Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 I was kinda hoping when they changed hands in the summer, that things might improve...seems it's the same bunch of cowboys with different hats:D
Jobos Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 I reported the redirection issue this morning by email to the EMBC and so far have not had an acknowledgement back.
rush_tech Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 I reported the redirection issue this morning by email to the EMBC and so far have not had an acknowledgement back. Did you at least get a Ref number?
Jobos Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 Would you believe it the ref number just came through!
sparkeh Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 Apparently its fixed, read and enjoy: 01/10/08 15.45 The URL page redirection incident has been resolved following investigation and testing with the EMBC applications. The incident arose because two of the Policy servers which were taken out of service for remedial work were still participating in communications between the SSO and the Netsweeper arrays. Once identified, the remedial work was completed and the devices were returned to service. Investigations are still under way as to why devices marked as out of service affected the live service.
TheCrust Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 Translation: we unplugged something to boil a kettle, and forgot to switch off the urn when we'd done.
kmount Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 I was kinda hoping when they changed hands in the summer, that things might improve...seems it's the same bunch of cowboys with different hats:D It didn't change hands in the summer, it was April. As for the problems yes, the redirection has been annoying and I agree the stability of the platform leaves a lot to be desired.
TheCrust Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 I agree the stability of the platform leaves a lot to be desired. I bet your LA didn't decide to host their VLE on the other side of it though. Ours chose Kaleidos as their VLE of choice - a platform currently hosted by RM in their server farm at Abingdon and effectively out on the wider internet. While this may have been the "best value" decision at the time, it's coming in for some serious questioning in schools when the EMBC service can be "less than 100% reliable", to be polite. I can think of at least half-a-dozen schools in my region that have had immense difficulty in delivering IT-based lessons over the last day or two because their internet access has been sporadic and they can't get to their VLE....
kmount Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 Our LA host our VLE outside of EMBC so we're in a similar boat to you there. To be honest, our staff don't use the VLE enough yet for it to have crippled plans but it did however stop us running our Midyis and Yellis online tests which really wound the staff up and it's not the first time this week.... What winds me up is that it took them over 24hrs to work out they (again) had servers in their rotation that shouldn't be there. We've experienced this type of slack systems management with Exchange boxes, Squids, and now this.
TheCrust Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 ...all of which re-inforces the viewpoint in the south-east corner of our region at least, that schools that have the technical staff on-site to manage their own connection should be left alone to get on with it. We did ask for that once - a plain vanilla internet feed from EMBC that we could filter and manage ourselves to BECTA standards, using services that suited our schools individual requirements. They said no, because the RBC was there to do that for us and that represented "best value" (this term comes up a lot in our region). Surely it must also have represented "fitness for purpose" at some stage, but we can't remember that far back.
kmount Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 We did ask for that once - a plain vanilla internet feed from EMBC that we could filter and manage ourselves to BECTA standards, using services that suited our schools individual requirements. There's nothing stopping you doing that to an extent... Declare a site wide filtering policy at level1 which allows pretty much everything, employ your own squids/etc and hey presto off you go. We're in the midst of employing our own squid server internally to give us whitelist access without needing the kids to log into EMBC to find their set to "allow only".
TheCrust Posted October 1, 2008 Posted October 1, 2008 Yeah, we kind of do that with our own ISA boxes at the moment - but even so there is always this level of EMBC-ness that is lurking in the background, getting in the way when you don't want it to. Like today with the filtering service issues - if schools were allowed to run their own in-house with the EMBC offering disabled, this wouldn't have been the issue it was for many. But that's not in the spirit of a centrally-manged service. Or BSF.
sparkeh Posted October 2, 2008 Posted October 2, 2008 We are still getting the redirect problem - anyone else seeing this?
sparkeh Posted October 2, 2008 Posted October 2, 2008 Guess Im not the only one: 02/10/2008 10.17 Some end users are reporting they are still affected by the URL page redirection issue. Initial investigations by our technical teams show the previous errors found on the policy servers are not present, we are still exploring this and other avenues, as well as working with the affected end users to establish if any other local conditions could be a contributing factor. We appreciate your continued patience while we fully investigate this issue.
kingswood Posted October 2, 2008 Posted October 2, 2008 We aren't getting the redirect issue this morning, but our bursar and head are upset that their email retrieval isn't working like it did yesterday! We had issues all week with redirect etc., but I have to say that EMBC have been great with us in the past few months- they have given us a bucket load of technical support concerning port opening and VLE setup etc. So it's not all bad (I suppose). I still can't get them to send me a password for WAT though, and that ticks me off. We too have thought about going it alone, but have never (yet) made the plunge...
GrumbleDook Posted October 2, 2008 Posted October 2, 2008 Ok, Paul is sorted for WAT now (oooh ... the power!!!) but a quick update for Northants members only! If you are having problems with access on the admin network (172.x.x.x rnage) to northants-ecl email accounts work is going on. For those that don't understand the structure ... the admin network travels via a VLAN through the EMBC and enters the NCC Corporate firewall where traffic for NCC resources go to the NCC Corporate network and EMBC / Internet stuff gets router out back to the EMBC having undergone NAT to a curriculum address (10.x.x.x). This means when there is a fault we have to deal with up to 5 different companies to identify where the fault lies. That means it takes longer to fix. This is not good and so we already have plans to do the routing / NAT within the EMBC so we remove a chunk of the issues. It takes it down to 3 companies (the email provider, Synetrix and Affiniti). I'll let people know when this is planned (information also going on to the schools fact sheet) but it'll be half-term at the earliest. The redirect ... work is still going on but if there are any more Northants members with ISA (or other proxies) onsite can they drop me a PM?
kingswood Posted October 2, 2008 Posted October 2, 2008 Ok, Paul is sorted for WAT now (oooh ... the power!!!) but a quick update for Northants members only! If you are having problems with access on the admin network (172.x.x.x rnage) to northants-ecl email accounts work is going on. For those that don't understand the structure ... the admin network travels via a VLAN through the EMBC and enters the NCC Corporate firewall where traffic for NCC resources go to the NCC Corporate network and EMBC / Internet stuff gets router out back to the EMBC having undergone NAT to a curriculum address (10.x.x.x). This means when there is a fault we have to deal with up to 5 different companies to identify where the fault lies. That means it takes longer to fix. This is not good and so we already have plans to do the routing / NAT within the EMBC so we remove a chunk of the issues. It takes it down to 3 companies (the email provider, Synetrix and Affiniti). I'll let people know when this is planned (information also going on to the schools fact sheet) but it'll be half-term at the earliest. The redirect ... work is still going on but if there are any more Northants members with ISA (or other proxies) onsite can they drop me a PM? Bah! Humbug! WAT still isn't working for me Paul
ilisle Posted October 2, 2008 Posted October 2, 2008 (edited) There's nothing stopping you doing that to an extent... Declare a site wide filtering policy at level1 which allows pretty much everything, employ your own squids/etc and hey presto off you go. We're in the midst of employing our own squid server internally to give us whitelist access without needing the kids to log into EMBC to find their set to "allow only". We found that E2BN didn't filter a lot of the sites we felt were unsuitable, so I found an old box (PIII 750, 256Mb RAM) and set up a Censornet (CensorNet - The Open Source Internet Protection Solution). It is basically a tweaked squid/Dansguardian, with LDAP importing facilities so you can add all your students at once. The ICT co-ordinator/teacher loves it, it helps keep the kids "on task" and if theres' a site that the RBC don't filter, we can add it in a matter of seconds. Another one to look, IMHO, is Untangle, this provides loads of services and can be run either standalone or on a spare Windoze XP machine. Edited October 2, 2008 by ilisle
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