Jonah

Could you drop this to me as well please?

Large mainstream secondary, ~600 devices, 1GB leased line, as a start

Just to hijack this slightly - if looking at a similar option (SW for filtering, Fortinet for firewall/SD-WAN, etc.), what model(s) would typically be suggested?

Does your Smoothwall do your routing, or does a core switch? Our default route out for the core switches is the SW IP. Our setup for two sites is: Site A (10.0.0.0/16) - Smoothwall IP 10.0.5.254, Smoothwall VLAN/Core Switch interface IP: 10.0.5.1 Subnet settings: Network: 10.0.0.0 Subnet: 255.255.0.0 Gateway: 10.0.5.1 IP Sec settings: Local IP: Local Network: 10.0.0.0/16 Remote IP: Remote Network: 10.10.0.0/16 Site B (10.10.0.0/16) - Smoothwall IP 10.10.5.254, Smoothwall VLAN/Core Switch interface IP: 10.10.5.1 Subnet settings: Network: 10.10.0.0 Subnet: 255.255.0.0 Gateway: 10.10.5.1 IP Sec settings: Local IP: Local Network: 10.10.0.0/16 Remote IP: Remote Network: 10.0.0.0/16

You also need a firewall rule to allow the IPSec interface to pass traffic to your internal LAN interface(s)

If you ping the Smoothwall DNS name from a client repeatedly, does it resolve each sites IP in turn and then repeat over? If so it’s likely DNS subnet prioritisation.

You can register for API access, we use it for a number of internal tools.

Yea, it’s a larger initial investment than most other options, balanced against the fact there’s no annual subscription, etc. and no limits on the amount you can backup other than physical space. I think it cost us around £20k for two RS appliances, a “primary” NAS with about 208TB, and then an offsite “backup” NAS at another school that pulls immutable snapshots with about 110TB.

We’ve recently moved to Synology, backing up both on-prem VMs and 365 data. It’s been flawless so far🤞

Well hello there, Does anyone by chance have any recent experience regards rough pricing on dark/unlit fibre (~6.5km)? Have approached Schools Broadband, BT, and Virgin but no replies as yet. We’re based in Manchester if that’s relevant. Cheers.

We’re seeing similar issues trying to access Smoothwalls Cloud portal from schools on SB, schools with others ISPs are fine. Does mean staff cannot review Smoothwall Monitor events, so something of a safeguarding issue! @SchoolsBroadband

Is pushing internal CA certs via NDES/SCEP not an option? We use that for pushing VPN certificates to users on Intuned devices for auth against NPS.

Interestingly, when we migrated one of our schools was using SIMS Hosted. We contacted them explaining we were planning a migration, and they happily transferred to us via SFTP a full backup of the database as requested, to be passed to our new provider…

We top slice for all central services (IT, HR, Finance, Estates).

There’s also the possibility to query via the Arbor API directly - we do this for our provisioning tools.