tom_newton

Oh that's interesting - is it definitely a Smoothwall thing then? Maybe it's... DNS? It seems it has been tough to reproduce

I suspect those FP's will go away - but only because Google are making it harder for us (by us, I mean all my mates in web filtering, regardless of vendor) to see the origin site of an image. Different techniques needed in 2025... [watch this space]

Ta. I popped it on the desk of our top categorisation chap yesterday

If you could lend us some credentials for the service (and put in a support ticket - send me the #!) we should be able to track it down and sort it

Thanks folks - some useful comments. I would agree that a DNS filter is not a suitable thing for an education environment. A blunt instrument. Additionally there is not even a self certified response from them in the "appropriate filtering" vendor responses at the safer internet centre.

My inclination is that "trying to beat" the filter is potentially a dangerous game (if it fails, you might be left with viruses, or adult content... or...) I would definitely talk to your vendor about what you are trying to achieve - do you want to be sure you have a decent filter (if wo then the folks at the safer internet centre can help) or that your filter is set up and working (in which case testfiltering.com is a good place to start)

I dont think there's any MDM control on the Kindle

We now have an android client for smoothwall, which is just coming out of beta - if anyone is interested email or DM me. Tom

Tim, that should still work - if you raise a ticket let me know and I will keep an eye on it. SOme of our 1st liners are new (we have undergone a fairly rapid expansion there!) so if theres any confusion I can sort it

It's basically how many connections the kernel can keep track of. Too small? Maybe you will drop stuff when you don't want to? Too big? It uses RAM, and probably a slight CPU penalty. IIRC "Auto" is calculated based on RAM installed. Id definitely keep it at "Auto" or higher. Sort of thing folks worried about when you had RAM in Mb and all this was fields.

They will do one or the other. Theyve always liked the flexibility.

I do indeed. If you want to drop me an email i'll see what we might be able to do to find all the stuff you need in various different ways.

Im afraid there's not a lot we can do about it - as I said it makes upstream MiTM challenging if you cant force a downgrade to 1.2 on the local leg. Our in-browser filtering would solve the issue if you wish to use both? Or if you are only using senso for Monitoring let me know and we can probably get you a solution that works.

Thanks folks - yes Monitor works offsite, it also works offline (by caching alerts and sending them as soon as it has internet access)

Thanks - no point not being honest with ourselves, or with our customers. I am confident that you'll have felt things better these last few weeks. Just from a pure numbers of tickets open PoV I can see it. Additionally I think our new guys are starting to get up to speed. They ask ME interesting questions anyway, that's always a good sign. We've another new starter in the team today, as well, hopefully they will be ready for battle by the time s-month rolls around.

I have some numbers - this school year (not quite closed!) we're so far hitting 98% of moderations for high priority in less than 30 mins, and 95% of low priority in less than an hour - so I would hope that you would see no high priority (that's the ones that need dealing with ASAP) anywhere near that mark.

There is a reporting feature - and it would be a very unusual moderation that took an hour. I will find someone who has access to our response time averages to give more details. I'd love to set you up a chat with one of our PMs to hear your views - anything we can do to improve the product would be really valuable,

There's a lot of development going on - and I hope you will see it bearing fruit this next year. The newest "Maiden" release of on-prem is rolling out as we speak, and next up is "Newport" which has been in development over a year. Cloud will be linking up with our colleagues at Linewize to give improved directory sync, and more integration with our classroom product, as well as newer agent software.

There's a couple of ways you can filter your ipads with Smoothwall - most have been mentioned here. We retain a custom browser (as it gives maximum safeguarding insight) but you will be pleased to hear it is now a fork of firefox so it is not hot garbage (like the one we acquired years ago!), it's a real browser

We know support hasnt been where we would like it to be this year - lots of additional demand, much of it unexpected. I know we're on a much better track now, however as we are adding to the team, and the backlog of tickets is way down. I am always happy to help investigate any issue that's ongoing.

Suspenseful thread. A+. BTW if you have forgotten the root p/w we can help.

Clear the cache: https://linux-audit.com/how-to-clear-the-arp-cache-on-linux/

Some sort of arp cache issue maybe?

Can you give me your ticket # - I will dig into it. Sounds difficult and unusual. Sometimes these struggle in the standard support queue.

As far as I know there are still no decent options for 802.1x with cloud - Microsoft will still ask you to have something on-site, which is frustrating. For managed devices my suggestion would be to look at on-device filtering, so usernames are automatically picked up.