markwilfan

^this...

To be honest guys I would take this to your safeguarding lead. Delegate the decision to somebody who may be more qualified to do so. In our school this has been the outcome of our discussions. We let staff access most categories of site. Anything that may be controversial pulls up a soft block so they can make the adult decision to carry on apart from pron. All sites are SSL decrypted by default apart from banking and manually approved sites that we have risk assessed and only if this is breaking some kind of service.

I assume that smoothwall themselves categorise websites and probably use some other master list too.

No filter at the moment but just think how Google ai works. In the future it may be possible. I should have added to my scenario that there would be text just like most other pron sites

The URL isn't. But content inside is. If the filter doesn't know what is inside it relies on knowing the category of the site. Consider this example. I register applesapplesapples.co.uk stuff it full of pron and enforce https. If my filter isn't doing mitm and doesn't know that my site has pron on it is open access for all.

We have had a situation where a member of non teaching staff has had their contract terminated due to inappropriate internet usage. Nobody would have suspected but smoothwall gave us that visibility and evidence. Sorry but comparing my bathroom to the use of monitoring on a school internet connection isn't the same.

The legal basis will be prevent and safeguarding

It's not covert if you inform them. If you don't do Https inspection you may as well not be doing filtering. URL filtering relies on your filter knowing the content of the site. If it is a new site that has just popped up that serves up some nice pron via Https and a teacher accesses it in front of children then expect lots of crying children.

You also have to consider that sometimes dodgy people slip though the net. It's like CCTV. People usually only have an issue with it if they want to hide something.

Good point, well made. Tbf unifi in the grand scheme of things isn't cheap. It just feels like better value for money

Ummmm... prevent duties.

The unifi switches are all layer 2 from what I know. The edgeswitches I think do layer 3. They have a unified security gateway that does layer 7 but wouldn't want that doing my core stuff like inter vlan routing as don't think it's chunky enough. Aruba on the other hand have everything but at a huge cost

Why would we need to do layer 7 stuff internally? Personally don't think it's needed on a school network with a 10g backbone and 1g to clients. We do layer 7 at our smoothwall

In 9 years and 10 months if the meraki switch goes down I have no doubt you'll get a new switch... With another 10 years licence? Very much doubt that. If you have used unifi recently you'll know that they do more than just "does the job". You mention the single pane of glass... Errrr unifi does this as well for free

I did an inplace upgrade 2012 R2 to 2016 in the summer. Couldn't face reinstalling sims. All went fine. Mine is a VM though so I snapshotted just in case.

@Sheridan This has just started happening to us too. Same setup as you. Been driving me crazy all day. Just come to the conclusion it is smooth wall too however it did work before Christmas

Wouldn't a laptop with no tpm but offline file cache encrypted suffice. As long as people cannot save files outside their user area should you lose the laptop the files are secure

@Wave9_Lee that is the price for a 48 port Poe+ sfp+ unifi switch. Total cost of ownership is important to me. That one off price I think represents good value for money compared to a one off purchase plus licence model. So how much would your ms120 be just out of interest

When I did my sccm 2012 training I was told only consider a cas if you plan to go over 100k devices. I'd just go single site with a dp mp at each one

Can you beat £675.00 for a 48 port gig switch with Poe+ and 2 sfp+?

Yarp...

I have just completed this on one of our Unifi 48 port POE switches for anybody that is interested. Cost about £48 but the switch is completely silent. Temp went up from 52c to 56c but all seems fine. Before - https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Op3bjyi8NDutfLn2bwzeaTA7rSBrJ8Q/view?usp=sharing During After - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wcKlJ6ESOgdK1RS35C6rRpHenhjlNoHr/view?usp=sharing

I've used webhelpdesk, Richmond help desk, opsd and osticket in production in busy IT environments. Osticket is my favourite followed by webhelpdesk mainly for the inventory built in

We use osticket for this. Shared between IT and site. Does the trick

I really liked freshdesk when I trialled it but couldn't justify the subscription