Which Web Filter for ISA 2004?

[eejit]

We are trialing ISA 2004 web filters at the moment, but are not 100% happy with any of them. (BTW, before you ask, the borough filtering is done by Synetrix/Equinox and is pants)

 

BTWebfilter from Burstek has a local list of bad URLs and blocked words and was initially impressive, but once you got used to it one of my erm... 'colleagues' was able to find incredibale amounts of porn quiet easily.

 

GFI Webfilter matches search requests with items on the Yahoo SafeSearch list and then adds the blocked ones to a urlblocklist on the ISA which made us think that that would be slow - and that's been our impression so far.

 

Surfcontrol is way, way too expensive so we haven't even trialled it.

 

 

What are your experiences with the above, or can you recommend other alternatives?

[Geoff]

Linux box + Squid + Dansguardian.

 

Haven't come across anything it can't block.

[sahmeepee]

We use Websense integrated into ISA 2000 and it works pretty well. It's not really capable of blocking individual rooms (or I haven't tried hard enough) but that's not something staff here really ask for.

 

It blocks all sorts of protocols as well as sites, so you can turn Skype off for kids but leave it on for staff for example. It also has fancy options for stopping streaming media if you reach x% of your bandwidth. The logging/reporting is also very impressive.

 

Downsides? Probably expensive, but ours is part of an LEA bulk-buy. There are filters for blocking malware etc., but they cost extra. Again, I'm not sure how much exactly.

[eejit]

Linux box + Squid + Dansguardian.

 

Haven't come across anything it can't block.

 

There is nothing that ISA "can't" block either, but the question is, does your combination do it all automatically?

[eejit]

@ sahmeeppee. Cheers for that, downloading a trial right now.

[Geoff]

Linux box + Squid + Dansguardian.

 

Haven't come across anything it can't block.

 

There is nothing that ISA "can't" block either, but the question is, does your combination do it all automatically?

 

Yes, because it uses greylisting and lots of other fun things comercial offerings fail to provide. Check out the feature list.

 

http://dansguardian.org/?page=introduction

[eejit]

Just rulled out GFI Webmonitor. It works really well at what it does, but unfortunatley it only blocks adult sites - no games, chat or proxies blocked

 

Burstek is definitely tops so far, but the trials continue.

[ZeroHour]

Get Smartfilter

Its cheap and has a large amount of categories and its designed for schools

we have found GFI to be hell to work with if something goes wrong.

[eejit]

Is it an ISA plugin? I'm up for any suggestions. "Cheap" is one thing that you don't hear when it comes to filters. (Linux excepted)

[ZeroHour]

Yeh it has plugings for most proxies and we use it with ISA 2004 here. It has logging software built in too which can be access over a web interface.

We found it cheap here for 3 years. We have 450 clients and I think it was around £7k but it really is the best out there.

Also you will need to configure your ISA to block exe's etc just incase you did not realise. Smartfilter though can do file extension blocking too but ISA does a better job of it.