Secondary line for Internet

[cheesypete]

Starting to look into what will be the best way to implement a secondary internet line into school

 

Currently have the main feed via county but the Deputy Head wants our Y12/Y13 to have "unfiltered" access in the library (filtering to be handled inhouse, rather than by overzealous EMBC filters!)

 

So, at the most we are talking 10 desktops using this line; standard ADSL or is there another alternative?

 

Leased line - way off the scale for what we want!

[plexer]

Have you discussed what you want to acheive with your county support team?

 

Ben

[Hightower]

Ask the EMBC take the filters out and install a Smoothy box - full control over the lot, and much easier than a second line.

[Willott]

Haven't you been given access to netsweeper for your school? You can do some control from there (although it only links to IP or EMBC user account). May be a way of providing the access without buying in further lines. For example, I've got a single IP assigned to my smoothy box, with a different filtering group setup in netsweeper to allow a much wider range of content through to the smoothwall box (which then does the filtering).

 

Ask the EMBC take the filters out and install a Smoothy box - full control over the lot, and much easier than a second line.

 

I've basically done this (kept some of EMBC's filters in to cover my back). Only issue I hit now is we still go via their load balanced IP, so if the one squid box that we connect through throws a wobbly, it stalls our net connection for a min or two until the load balancer notices and kicks us elsewhere (or the squid box reboots... not sure which). EMBC are very reluctant to open up port 80 outbound for any machines (understandably so), and I've also been unable to gleam multiple IPs from them for upstream proxy (as they want to load balance themselves) which would provide us with a solution where if Smoothy is unable to connect it tries another one.

[cheesypete]

Have you discussed what you want to acheive with your county support team?

 

Ben

 

Think thats a fair point to make, and one which i havent undertaken

 

 

@ Hightower - mmm interesting thought but I guess i should have also pointed out, which may sway this discussion, is that its not all about the filtering - its all about having some sort of backup connection in the very unlikely event of major downtime

[plexer]

We have a county provided failover adsl as part of our service.

 

Ben