matt40k Posted October 13, 2008 Posted October 13, 2008 Anyone here have any moans about E2BN? I've never really had any issues with them, other then the cacheboxs have telnet.
featured_spectre Posted November 13, 2008 Posted November 13, 2008 the fact that they do not block the sites that you request, despite the blatent reason for blocking them! The decided that porn was not worthy to block but a website on politics was. oh the fun!
donutcat Posted November 14, 2008 Posted November 14, 2008 Has anyone actually managed to get a blocked site unblocked? I tried one this week, but have got no response, no access, no nothing. At least tell us you got the message. right?
plexer Posted November 14, 2008 Posted November 14, 2008 Our RBC is E2BN but our filtering is done by Norfolk County Council or rather by BT on behalf of NCC at their data centre. Ben
featured_spectre Posted November 14, 2008 Posted November 14, 2008 I managed to get a science website unblocked. The kids were doing a project on the digestive system and everything to do with the word "anus" 10x or more was blocked, so I got them to lower the filters a bit. Seems fine since.
matt40k Posted November 14, 2008 Author Posted November 14, 2008 Just asked Simon Bright (E2BN) to remove it. Those forms just don't work.
DG01 Posted November 20, 2008 Posted November 20, 2008 I have a pretty good relationship with ICT Solutions after months of moaning. Usually I tend to be able to get them to get things done. Can't always say the response times are good and the manual processing of new RFA's seem to take a while...
johnsw16 Posted February 2, 2009 Posted February 2, 2009 Just asked Simon Bright (E2BN) to remove it. Those forms just don't work. I've just been directed to this thread so I've joined just so I can reply on E2BN's behalf... The forms do work - we get a steady stream of requests to block/unblock sites for staff and pupils both via both the online form and the "block page" form link. We try to be as open as we can regarding unblocking sites and during the normal school week to action requests within 24hours. All the days changes are updated overnight to all the servers in the Protex system. Because of the potential volumes and the sometimes less that temperate language some forms are ignored. Other forms may be incomplete or have incorrectly formatted e-mail addresses - these are automatically ignored. Finally, some replies are bounced from commercial and LA mail systems because they see them as spam or contain inappropriate language. If you have tried so make submissions and they have not been acted upon or you've not had a reponse (and you've had no reply) then you can mail the filtering team directly on [email protected]: but this is not the place to make requests for blocking or unblocking - these must go via the online forms so that they can be logged.
johnsw16 Posted February 2, 2009 Posted February 2, 2009 the fact that they do not block the sites that you request, despite the blatent reason for blocking them! The decided that porn was not worthy to block but a website on politics was. oh the fun! Can you let me know what sites you are talking about and when the requests were made so I can look through the database? We have had very little trouble with porn as the content checking is very efficient with these sites: in all the Becta tests that have been run against Protex we have scored 100% on detecting porn sites.
matt40k Posted February 2, 2009 Author Posted February 2, 2009 Last time I checked, these were available on the students profiles 8081-8083. Which meant students were completing the forms, thus giving you lots of spam. Why don't you limit them to only 8084. Generally if a website doesn't work the school will try the address on the staff profile before moving on. I also believe you force users to use an internal IP address range, surely you could then match this to a school. Even a generic email to a standard email would be better then ignoring onces with wrong email addresses. Ideally you want v2 to be deployed :] Again, my "real life" experience is that the forms just don't work, emailing filtering does, sorry to quote names, but he's the guy who normally does it. If you've made any changes to the forms and there filtering, I would make this clear to the LEAs and make sure they filter this down, as no-one I know has faith in the forms. Feel free to correct me. I believe nephilim is referring to a website that has no text (or limited) but has explicate images that has now been blocked by E2BN\URLblacklists etc. Generally the filtering is fine, just issue of it being not as good as Smoothwall (in my opinion). Oh, what about the fact you have telnet rather then SSH?
johnsw16 Posted February 2, 2009 Posted February 2, 2009 Last time I checked, these were available on the students profiles 8081-8083. Which meant students were completing the forms, thus giving you lots of spam. Why don't you limit them to only 8084. Generally if a website doesn't work the school will try the address on the staff profile before moving on. We have found the pupils comments very valuable in picking up sites that should be unblocked - and they are usually more proactive than staff who may not bother sending in a form. I also believe you force users to use an internal IP address range, surely you could then match this to a school. Even a generic email to a standard email would be better then ignoring ones with wrong email addresses. Not quite sure what you mean by this: the IP address of the server can be anything as long as we have the relevant details to allow secure access to our management systems. So, for example, users have external IP addresses, 10-dot E2BN addresses, or private addresses behind a NAT. If a user submits a form from the block page then this can, indeed, be tracked back to an individual cache but this may not be a school one - more often that not, however, it will be the central LA caches. Also the request to block page can be submitted from anywhere. Ideally you want v2 to be deployed :] V2 is already being deployed in school based systems allowing, for example, integration with a local AD. Again, my "real life" experience is that the forms just don't work, emailing filtering does, sorry to quote names, but he's the guy who normally does it. Hmm - I think I must beg to differ - we have over 32,000 logged requests to show that they do work! Oh, what about the fact you have telnet rather then SSH? We have never been happy about this either! This was an issue with the Appliansys Cachebox - the newer ones (v3.12) come with ssh which is much better. Regards.
matt40k Posted February 2, 2009 Author Posted February 2, 2009 I see the point about the IP limiting. I would still actually ask the head teachers\ict coordinators etc for real feedback. I bet some didn't even know you could!
z0d Posted February 13, 2009 Posted February 13, 2009 I have had exactly zero response from any Protex comment form. I certainly have never used intemperate language on these! Sometimes the changes get made (after submitting many requests), but we're never told whether the changes have been/will be made, or even that the form has been received. Fixing these two issues would greatly improve our school's perception of E2BN. If there are too many requests to handle, then I respectfully suggest E2BN need to hire more staff, or change the way they handle these forms, perhaps delegating some of the handling of these requests. If a school purchases a CACHEBox, then I believe they can add sites to the lists. I have never tried this, however. I have had this site: XnView successfully unblocked, so sometimes, the forms do work. If the forms are perceived as not working, then they don't work. Does anyone have any documentation on configuring these boxes? This page: Main Page - E2BNWiki is pathetic. (We have a `trial' CACHEBox 200, but due to lack of docs, I haven't put it into active service. I could just deploy it as an alternative to the upstream caches, since we have a pre-existing Squid box...) Incidentally, I met John H at BETT 2009, and he seems like a really knowledgeable and dedicated guy. This screed is in no way directed at him! PS - I think that 8084 idea is pretty good, but then John H works at E2BN, so whatever... Some sort of verified address for submitting changes seems like a good idea though.
johnsw16 Posted February 13, 2009 Posted February 13, 2009 Thanks for the vote of confidence! The page you mention is for the older version which (as you are from Essex and have a test box) you do not have. I am at this very moment writing some new documentation for Protex v2. V1 had not set up to do really other than installing it so this page was just to explain the general policy and the admin interface which is mostly just adding and deleting URLs from the local list. The new version does take a bit more setting up - if you want NTLM authentication - and this is what I writing now. Also we are planning to set up some training sessions soon. I take on board the comment forms: in general the handling is done outside E2BN and we get the problematic ones to vet and deal with. I'll get on the the people who do this and reiterate the point about feeding back when changes are made and, if not, why not.
johnsw16 Posted February 13, 2009 Posted February 13, 2009 PS: if you have any of the IDs you were given when you submitted a request can you forward a couple to me so I can check what action was taken. In theory any positive action should have a reply - but we do get some mail bounced back from LA mail services so I want to see whether a reply was actually sent but not received or whether not reply was made by us at all. Thanks. (mail off list to [email protected])
bertster Posted February 13, 2009 Posted February 13, 2009 I'm yet another who has had zero response from any Protex comment form and I too have certainly never used intemperate language on the forms! I work in multiple schools and have never received any communication regarding the form being received or if the change will be made or not. A page is blocked, a form is submitted but we are constantly in the dark whether anything is being done/or will be done. Communication is the key, even if its a no!
z0d Posted February 13, 2009 Posted February 13, 2009 It's not really NTLM auth I'm concerned about just yet (that's next week!), just associating a filter list with a port for now, and how the filter lists work. I'd like: . servers on as unfiltered as possible a connection, since I've seen e.g. "libsexy" (!) get blacklisted, which prevented an update applying . Staff on a "Staff" profile, years 12 & 13 on "Sixth Form", years 7-11 on "Secondary" and naughty users in a horrible primary-school walled garden type cage! The ports bit is just for testing purposes, I'll probably deploy this with either IP or account (group) restrictions. I hope it is easy, so I don't have to bother making our proxy box work with our LDAP groups properly! I thought I could just tell the CACHEBox (horrible capitalisation!) to run on ports 8080-8085 and associate a list with each port, but none of the lists except Secondary seem to work as I expect (all are too restrictive) as far as I can tell. We are running a Samba domain here, so I hope we can get away without a `proper' AD. Does anyone know of a less dangerous way of allowing the Samba account for the CACHEBox enough privs? I'd rather not give it Domain Admin access, just in case... Apologies if it seems like I'm just asking to be spoon-fed, but I haven't thought too hard about this yet, and I don't have any docs to read! I don't expect anyone to spend time on this for me. When Mr. Brain is working at optimum efficiency, I might be a bit more useful.
kimclayton Posted February 13, 2009 Posted February 13, 2009 Hi Ive read this thread with some surprise I havent had any problems getting innapropriate sites blocked. earlier this week eg I requested addictordie.com to be removed from primary access as we are a special needs school and some of the games are innapropriate. Response was within 24 hrs. I have also successfully requested that an individual bebo page was allowed as one of our kids was terminally ill and was using it as her blog. I have always found John to be very helpful so p-lease do not upset him Oh by the way I am not usually as pro the "service" that we receive from the RBC but this is rarely the fault of individuals within the organisation credit should be given where its due. the link that i use to make block/unblock requests is below: I would think that JohnH could confirm that this is still the correct route? "http://protex.e2bn.org/listrequest" Kim Clayton
z0d Posted February 13, 2009 Posted February 13, 2009 (edited) I just click the "Send Comment" button on a banned site then fill in the form. I don't see any posts in this thread (not read others) having a go at John, or any named individual, just the service which people are seeing from E2BN. (Not necessarily the same as the service they receive!) Anyway, it's Friday, near the end of the day, and I have a mug of tea and a chocolate biscuit, so I wish you all the best. Edited February 13, 2009 by z0d Ahh! "Profile picture" =/= "Avatar"!
matt40k Posted February 13, 2009 Author Posted February 13, 2009 I just click the "Send Comment" button on a banned site then fill in the form. Generally you get a url from a teacher who can't fill the form in because it's too hard\takes too long, so you submit it from the above url Anyway, it's Friday, near the end of the day, and I have a mug of tea and a chocolate biscuit, so I wish you all the best. YaY friday!!! Just need to find some chocolate now!
nfen Posted February 24, 2009 Posted February 24, 2009 Hello, Firstly I'd like to introduce myself. I may have already met some of you but Greetings to those I have not. My name is Nick Fennell and I have been the senior member of Appliansys with regards to the Essex deployment of the CACHEBox200/Protex filtering appliance. I would like to make my presence known so that aspects of confusion regarding the appliance(s) being installed and any problem(s) post install can be dealt with promptly and efficiently. Although I will try to monitor this forum I can not guarantee any time scale for responses and as such any serious issues should be reported to us directly. This can be done by email to '[email protected]' or by telephone to 02476 430090. I hope this helps to answer any questions you may have. Best Regards, Nick ----------------- Nick Fennell Appliansys Ltd. ApplianSys: The Server Appliance Specialist
artfulmatt Posted February 24, 2009 Posted February 24, 2009 (edited) We (Bungay High School) won't be renewing our contract with E2BN - our main issue with them is we asked if we were able to open some ports to allow access to our sharepoint intranet site for staff and students.....answer back was no and to use uniservity - which is a whole load of crap which most of you are aware....so we are moving to a managed firewall solution using our own filter (bloxx) also saving many ££££ in doing so Uniservity have also confessed they can't and won't be able to access sims to give parents/staff/students information which is a requirement for 2010...Hense sims learning gateway based on sharepoint. What SCC are planning on doing to get around this i don't know? lol Edited February 24, 2009 by artfulmatt
matt40k Posted April 7, 2009 Author Posted April 7, 2009 We (Bungay High School) won't be renewing our contract with E2BN - our main issue with them is we asked if we were able to open some ports to allow access to our sharepoint intranet site for staff and students.....answer back was no and to use uniservity - which is a whole load of crap which most of you are aware....so we are moving to a managed firewall solution using our own filter (bloxx) also saving many ££££ in doing so Uniservity have also confessed they can't and won't be able to access sims to give parents/staff/students information which is a requirement for 2010...Hense sims learning gateway based on sharepoint. What SCC are planning on doing to get around this i don't know? lol Suppose I better do some PR work. SuffolkCC\CSD won't open the ports, they do a reverse proxy (apart of the E2BN network) which will give you access to your local HTTP(S) server. Uniservity is linking into SIMS as apart of the new Capita agreement, not idea the scope, I stay away from this beast, I believe it's Becta approved so it covers the 2010 requirements. I believe there is a CSD project to look at offering SLG2, otherwise it'll stay with direct from Capita.
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now