iPad & Kindle (and probably other devices) not working on BGFL

[CHR1S]

Dont know if you have encountered this yet but many devices will not work behind the BGFL firewall.

 

I would like to get a show of hands and some form of list going to present to L2ICT so they hurry up and replace their ageing firewall to allow targeted connections from said devices out to cloud services.

 

Kindles cant connect to the store

iPads (etc) cant connect to IMAP/POP SSL/ etc unless the service allows it over port 80

 

I appreciate the need for security and safeguarding but we are being very restricted in what we can do now.

[andy_b]

Android Market (Google Play) - although they did say they are working on a solution when I asked them.

[CHR1S]

Seems the definitive answer is a new more customisable proxy/firewall at the end of this year (not financial)

[stevenlong1985]

My HTC flyer, cant connect to youtube as-well,

[andy_b]

My HTC flyer, cant connect to youtube as-well,

 

The youtube app on android devices doesn't seem to work well with proxy settings. I did get it working by creating a transparent proxy with IPCOP and then using eduproxy as the upstream proxy.

 

In the end it seemed too much hassle just for youtube

[jamin100]

This is the reason we had to buy 3G kindles

Not had a problem with the ipads though... but then again they dont get much use here!!!

[limbo]

We had problems with the eye-fi cards we purchased for wireless transfer of photo's from cameras but the BGfL have been really pro-active in sorting this out for us and now they work really well and we appreciate that we should probably have looked into them before we purchased them - their dislike of proxies is well documented.

 

Link2ICT even updated their change request form to make it easier to make the request.

 

I suspect a new firewall is not what is needed, just a better mechanism for managing the requests (and probably a bigger team to process them) that is less reactive and a bit more proactive - which is where this co-ordinated list of known issues will be really valuable - but it should not be about "here is the list make it happen" rather more looking at the type of issues on the list and what the global solution could be to suit every school (there will likely be things on the list I would not want made available here!)

 

That is my two cents for what it is worth (which is probably less than two cents)

[GrumbleDook]

To be honest, even if BGfL do change their firewall ... it is not about changing the hardware, but about a combination of the process for change and also trying to sort out the changing security requirements due to new tech. From the point of view of another RBC I know how painful it is to try to deal with consumer devices coming in to schools which require global changes to the firewall due to particular ports which need to be open to access online app stores, un-configurable proxies settings (I still get hacked off with no settings for https and other ports and the lack of ability to set proxy exceptions!) and so you get down the road of transparent proxies ... and this is then linked to a change of infrastructure within a school, managed wireless networks and so on ...

 

It is, as is usually the case, increasingly complicated as you change one thing ... only to result in having to address 4 others!

[Technomancer]

In the case of Kindles, they do not currently play nicely in proxied environments and this is also the case with a number of Android and iPhone/iPad apps. Android versions below 2.3 also have very poor support for proxy connections and generally apps do not use the proxy settings. There are possible solutions, but they are neither simple nor cheap and highlight sharply the issue of consumer devices not supporting the standards required to work within corporate network environments.

[Little-Miss]

Did they change the form recently? I told them to as it made no sense! lol

 

Ive only just been able to use my iPad over https:// sites, i mentioned this a while back now. But they've sorted it.

[PeteW]

Cloud devices user CDNs which the current BCC Firewall does not support. This will require investment on the firewall infrustructure which they are looking into but you are probably looking towards the end of the year but lost likely 2013.

 

Saying that, iPads, Kindles and other devices are not very proxy aware either. Testing some of the devices, you can view their respective stores via the proxy but as soon as you try to download them, it forgets the proxy settings exist and try to go direct. This is the same issue with apps, unless they have designed the app to look at the devices proxy settings, it will not work. But with big pushes from Apple and such, for the education market, this might change.