Unfiltered Internet Connection

[Guest richard]

I have been asked to give our staff unfiltered access to the internet as they have been complaining about the filtering on the network. We currently use an ISA 2000 which connects to our ISP's (Easynet) upstream proxy for content filtering. So I was wondering how you guys manage it (if at all).

[Norphy]

We use ISA 2000 but we can't give our staff a completely unfiltered connection as we too connect to a filtered upstream proxy. What we do though is have some internal filters (using destination sets) which we only apply to student groups in ISA.

 

Out of morbid curiosity, are you on E2BN as well?

[GrumbleDook]

IIRC safety.ngfl.gov.uk recommends that staff are filtered to the same level as students apart from where appropriate ... it'll take some time to dig out the exact reference but you have a duty of care to the students to prevent them from seeing anything inappropriate and if a member of staff allows a student to use their compuater and has left themselves logged in the they student can access everything.

 

Also, if the computer is hooked up to a projector and the teacher searches the internet all sorts of things could come up.

 

My advice would be to get you ISP to have a group with teacher accounts in it and then apply a special additional white list to that group. Then if a member of staff wants to access a URL you add it to that white list.

 

Or you could let them have what they want after giving them ample warning and when it goes wrong say "I told you so!"

 

We do it by looking after the filtering ourselves (just moving from SWS to smoothwall at the moment) and our ISP allow us to be unfiltered (this applies to NTL and EMBC who we are moving to ... eventually ... when they can work out that DNS forwarding is a valid method of managing DNS without the transfer of the domain tag ... but please don't get me started on that!)

[openhgs]

We got an ADSL link from an ISP and chucked in an ADSL router. The very privileged users have their gateway set to the i/p address of the ADSL router. Everyone else has their gateway set to the LEAs router. Easy! Now you might think that anyone could change their gateway and get unfiltered access. Nup! Our pupils use a Linux thin client network and they can't change anything on the servers, and the staff are too thick to work out that some users have access that is unfiltered.

 

We also run our own content filtering, so potentially everyones web access is double filtered for extra purity. It's a smart system too, in that staff bypass our content filter (ie they just get the LEAs filtering) and the pupils get extra clean access. I can use this box to control access to the ADSL router too in the event that an unauthorised staff member works out how to change their gateway.

[Guest richard]

Out of morbid curiosity, are you on E2BN as well?

 

Nope.

 

I have been thinking about putting in something like a Smoothwall box for and using that to give staff their unfiltered access. I don't want to do this but I have been told by my line manager.

 

I already have an unfiltered link for the servers via a netgear firewall box which which is access via the default gateway but as I have to give the access via any machine that a teacher uses I would like a better solution.

[Ric_]

I'd question what they are looking for on the Internet first! The stuff is usually filtered for a reason after all!

 

Attaching DSL routers and the like to your network can be dodgy (legally) too because you are effectively connecting an unsecured network to JANET. Your RBC will also hate you.

[Chafftech]

I have the staff and pupils on the same filtering level with the staff allowed some exceptions.

 

Most corporate firms have filtering on the web access so unifiltered access for staff is really not neccessary. I would have to agree with ric_ about the having an extra DSL line on your network without at least heavily securing with firewall, and also filtering out the obvious such a porn -which would defeat the reason for it really other than extra bandwidth.

[Guest richard]

We are not on an RBC.

[Ric_]

We are not on an RBC.

 

Fair enough... still a pointless waste of money getting a dedicated feed for the teachers to do their shopping and look at porn! - Unless... just had a cunning thought... the dedicated feed is the old 33.6kpbs modem gathering dust in the cupboard :twisted:

[Guest richard]

Unless... just had a cunning thought... the dedicated feed is the old 33.6kpbs modem gathering dust in the cupboard :twisted:

 

I've got an old 18kpbs modem somewhere

[openhgs]

I've got an old 18kpbs modem somewhere

 

I used to dream of 18kps. When I first started to use modems they were 300 baud (and we were)

[CyberNerd]

lol. Me too, when a leet bbs could be hosted on 14.4 HST. those were the days.....

[SimpleSi]

When I first started to use modems they were 300 baud

 

I used to dream of 300 baud. (and a modem)

 

We had 110 baud teletypes

 

 

Simon

[Geoff]

Dansguardian supports filter groups. That's how I'd do it if I needed to.

[GrumbleDook]

(in a Yorkshire accent) Well ... when I say it was a modem, it was just a copule of tin cans with a bit of damp string, with me and a mate making high pitch gurgling sounds into them ... but it was a modem to us!

[TechMonkey]

(in a Yorkshire accent) Well ... when I say it was a modem, it was just a copule of tin cans with a bit of damp string, with me and a mate making high pitch gurgling sounds into them ... but it was a modem to us!

/plays along

 

Two cans!!! & Damp string!!! We had just one can between 5 families and had to pretend it was connected to it self, and the only gurgling was TB from poor little Johnny. But it kept us occupied

 

/leaves quickly

[Richie1972]

We have an ADSL link as well as a broadband link through the county.

The County and ADSL links are connected through an ISA2004 and configured so that if (usually WHEN) the county link falls over it automatically switches to the ADSL link. By doing this the school still has (degraded) internet access.

For internet filtering, however, we're using Websense and have different filtering groups for the students and teachers.

So far we're finding it fine - and no one's come complaining to say the internet's gone down (even though I've looked through the ISA server's event logs to see reports of the county link going off)