Connection issue, help wanted

[EdWhittaker]

Hi

I'm posting here in hope that someone may be able to help. My company provides an on-line behaviour management facility to a school on LGfL. The week before half term they found that they were unable to connect to our site. Their managed service provider blamed us saying our servers were down, as other internet services were unaffected. After a lot of messing about we eventually got to speak to the managed service provider who agreed it wasn't our fault. Another week went by and they suggested that the fault lay with LGfL. It's now 7 (yes, seven!) weeks the school has been unable to reach our site. Staff can log in perfectly well from home, but not from school. Has anyone experienced anything like this before or got any suggestions?

[glennda]

tbh sounds like they have blacklisted the sites - I think the filtering for the LGFL is run by Atomwide - who also provide filtering from where i am - if you pm the website (or post it here i can try and connect for you and see what happens.

[GREED]

Where is your site hosted? Is it the same as (probably not) as the school?

 

Had this issue ages ago whereby a site we wanted to access which was hosted by the same LA as our internet was through constantly had problems with access, and it was to do with the internal routing. Constant battle to get said LA to sort this out.

 

Not suggesting this is the same, but worth a thought

[EdWhittaker]

Guys

Thanks for the prompt replies. Graham, our application is hosted on servers managed by ForLinux in Notts, so it's probably not what you suggest. But big thanks for taking the trouble.

@glennda: Thanks, I'll pm you shortly.

[glennda]

Where is your site hosted? Is it the same as (probably not) as the school?

 

Had this issue ages ago whereby a site we wanted to access which was hosted by the same LA as our internet was through constantly had problems with access, and it was to do with the internal routing. Constant battle to get said LA to sort this out.

 

Not suggesting this is the same, but worth a thought

 

we had this with trying to access our owa inside school

 

the way we now have it is that our lea has the internal address for an internal dns lookup and the external address for external stuff

[GREED]

we had this with trying to access our owa inside school

 

the way we now have it is that our lea has the internal address for an internal dns lookup and the external address for external stuff

 

Yep, that sduff dat you just sed is wot we did. lol

[Edinlondon]

Have you thought of contacting the lgfl technical manager? Go to contact.lgfl.net.

[EdWhittaker]

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. Currently in contact with Synetrix who apparently do the filtering etc. They promised a response within 30 hours. Well, we'll wait and see.

[gonzodad]

@EdWhittaker - yes we provide the filtering and the network for most lgfl schools. PM me your call ref and ill see what i can do to resolve the situation.

[gonzodad]

got your PM cheers. a servicedesk team leader will contact you, as they want some more diags / technical info to help troubleshoot.

[EdWhittaker]

Thanks for the help. Much appreciated. :-)

[EdWhittaker]

We're now into week 8 and situation still not resolved. Synetrix say the problem is outside their remit and are talking to the managed service provider to try and perform a trace route.

Spoke to managed service provider who say they are going to replace the proxy server which "hopefully, should solve the problem". Hmm, doesn't look like a hardware problem from where we're sitting, but you never know. Fingers X'd.

[EdWhittaker]

Proxy server now replaced, but still no joy. However, we do know that the problem is definitely local to the school. Couldn't be anything as simple as filter or protocol settings on the proxy, could it?

[Chris_Cook]

Do the school have their own internal proxy/web filter as well? Could be an issue with that. If so, can they add an exception for your site?

 

Presumably your website uses some sort of authentification, what does it use?(NTLM/Digest/etc)

[EdWhittaker]

I think the service provider has narrowed it down to the internal proxy in the school (it's only take 8 weeks to do that). I think we did suggest that to them on day one. They tell us that the problem is now resolved, but we haven't seen any activity at the school yet.

[DMcCoy]

ntlm authentication on your site could break it, if the school is already using a ntlm authenticating proxy.

[Edinlondon]

If it's your internal proxy, you wouldn't see any activity as it's your issue. The call is surely resolved because there is nothing for them to do.

[gonzodad]

@EdWhittaker - have you seen any school activity yet ?

[EdWhittaker]

Hi, thanks for the interest.

Access was restored on Monday, but there was no activity. Seemed to be working ok on Tuesday with some activity but there was nothing yesterday. Whether that was due to system unavailability or it just wasn't used I don't know. There is activity today, but not a lot. Having not had access for 8 weeks (!) I'm thinking the staff may need a re-launch to get them into it again.

I'm not sure that the fix isn't a temporary workaround, there was some suggestion that it was (temporary). I have asked for an explanation of what the problem was (is), but as yet I've not received a reply (why am I not surprised?).

[Edu-IT]

Remember that a lot of schools are now winding down/closing.