SchoolsBroadband

Hello everyone, we've a special offer on at the moment for a full 1Gbps Virgin Media Leased line for only £750 install and £2,995pa on a 60 month term. That's a 5 hour fix with guaranteed speeds 24/7/365. It's open to both primary and secondary schools and can be used in conjunction with any of our firewall, filtering and UTM products if required. It's available in 95% of Virgin Media areas. Please call the team on 0 11 33 222 333 or email [email protected] and we'll get back to you asap. Circuit needs to go live before 1st April 2027. Offer open until 1st September 2026. Thanks Dave

So the issue is that Apple have decided change security settings when using Google. By default we block rather than allow some IP ranges unbeknown or uncategorised to us. It appears Apple are using some new IPs to work with Google. We have figured out what this is and will be allowing the relevant IPs shortly once we've finished with testing which is likely today or early Monday. If other companies netsweeper or security services weren't affected then they will have different security polices to our own. Thanks Dave

Well I can assure you all we haven't changed anything. Our NOC team are investigating in conjunction with our vendors. At the moment we are recommending customers don't upgrade to that software revision. We have a status update on our portal our customers can follow. Thanks Dave

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Cheers @tom_newton, yes we can do agent based filtering and NClient. If you get in touch with your AM they can help you. Thanks Dave

Hello @Alastairb25 We can do Starlink via our infrastructure so your firewalling and filtering still work or we can simply add a port that runs NAT on the Mikrotik router that doesn't touch our ISP infrastructure. There are pro's and conn's of doing both. If you give your account manager a call they'll probably get one of our Technical Account Managers to call you back. Thanks Dave

From memory I think Fortinet disabled always on VPN from their free version of Forticlient. If you can want it nailed on your need to buy the paid for version and then it can do what you require by forcing all traffic via your FortiGate device and applying a filtering policy. Dave

Red Dwarf when I was a teenager was THE thing to watch on BBC 2 each week. Some of the best comedy around. A very sad day.....

Morning Alastair, no issues we are aware of. If you'd care to DM me the ticket number I can have a further look with my support manager. Thanks Dave

Starlink is great. We've dozens of schools using it. We can supply schools with Satellite connections and csn even failover your main lines ip addresses too. If youd like a quite for one do let me know. Cheers Dave

Morning everyone, we have a number of customers that have Starlinks boxed away for use in case of emergencies so I wanted to highlight the below communication we've had from Starlink otherwise you may have a Starlink that just won't work if you came to deploy it and you haven't upgraded its software. This isn't just the Starlink service that we provide but if you've bought direct from Starlink too. Thanks Dave Software Update Required An important software update is required for your Starlink kit. This update is part of ongoing improvements for security, performance and reliability. To receive this update, please follow these simple steps: If it isn't already on, plug in your Starlink and place it outside. You do not need a perfectly clear view of the sky to receive the update. Once powered on, your Starlink will download the available update and prompt you when its ready to install. This should take less than 15 minutes. It is critical you perform this software update before November 17. After that date, your Starlink will be unable to access the Internet until the update is completed. For additional help, please contact support. Note: You do not need an active service line to complete this update, and you will not be charged at any point during this update. These Starlink terminals must be updated: YOUR TERMINAL ID HERE To find your Starlink Terminal ID, open the Starlink app, go to the home screen, scroll to the bottom, and select "Advanced." It's listed under the "Starlink" section as the Terminal ID.

Try send voip out of one connection only rather than by and kind of load balancing. Id suggest you have phones on their own vlan too so its easy for the smoothwall box to identify them and create a policy for them. You could try so that via either connection too to further test where the issue is. Dave

I use Qoria for my daughters home phone and laptop.

Can we not just install another broadband line next to the existing one? The wiring will likely already exist so no additional cabling. Alternatively you could use a Starlink which can be done on rolling 30 day contracts. We can offer both the above with or without security and filtering. I'd be happy to check out what broadband availability you have and investigate the ease of install for you. Thanks Dave

We've something new coming very shortly. I'll send you a DM. Thanks Dave

I'm on leave until Tuesday so will dm you then. Dave

Depends on number of devices, connectivity throughput, session count and the kind of UTM policy you want to put on

We had a look at many products in the market and despite our filtering being Netsweeper we decided to partner with Smoothwall because of the managed monitoring. Yes its a bit more but it saves time and therefore money overall as well as being consistent in our opinion. Dave

They've not had the best 12 months with the SSL issues in particular which caused us and I'm sure others massive headaches, but still all vendors have bugs / vulnerabilities. Last time I checked Fortinet were still very much in the upper right hand corner of firewall, UTM and various other similar Gartner Magic quadrants. I think they are the largest firewall / security stack vendor in the world and also hold contracts with a plethora of government agencies including HMRC I believe. I suspect they also protect the most schools in the UK too. Both we and LGFL for example use them. Dave

Fortinet #1 in the world when it comes to firewalls. Dave

I think you could probably use it for UTM still but you'd probably not NAT on the external interfaces and let the Fortigate do that instead. You could push all UTM to the FortiGate and leave the smoothwall doing filtering only. Dave

A fortigate box would do this. Sd-wan functionality is foc. No need for any licences or support. You could buy support only pa. As youre using no other functionality of the firewall its quite cpu and memory light so you don't need a big box. You can make a full or partial mesh too. Happy to quote for it if its of interest. Dave

This is very complicated. All of our Data Centres (of which we use some of the top ones in the country, Telehouse etc) have resilient power feeds, UPS and diesel generators if they individually have issues but if they whole country had an issue and there was then significant requirements in say diesel delivery over a protracted period then I suspect the government could prioritise some sites over others. Different data centres have different reserves of diesel on site already. There's then also the carrier networks and how they take the data back to those data centres which will all be different. The honest answer is I'm sure there will be major disruption all over the country. There are now over 100 altnets which will all have different policies on how total loss of mains power would be for them. Sorry I can't be of much more help on this. Dave

Hello, this is something we deliver to many MATs including some of the largest in the country, certainly to many of your size. We are an ISP with our own network (not a layer 3 re-seller over someone else's) giving us ultimately flexibility. We terminate connectivity from all the major carriers and a growing number of alnets into a single virtualised hosted FortiGate (security) and Netsweeper (filtering) interface. This by default can create a private WAN across all of your schools that enables you to do exactly what you require. One of the big advantages of Netsweeper is its hierarchical nature. You can push policies down to other schools quite easily. You can even delegate some control to schools to block or allow schools themselves if you wish, or you can easily centrally control everything yourself. Our service can also be co-managed or fully managed by our team of engineers. Reporting is also included via our own hub platform which integrates with our CRM giving you real-time safeguarding alerts. We also offer SD-WAN solutions using onsite FortiGates which again can integrate with our hosted Netsweeper solution too giving you the same interface as per our virtualised hosted FortiGate when used in conjunction with FortiManager. Finally we also now have a partnership with Smoothwall and have been delivering their services to some of our customers also with a similar outcome to your requirements. We deliver our service to over 3,000 schools in England and are also on many of the major frameworks to aid with your route to market. We'd be happy to give you a demo of either solution depending on your requirements. Cheers Dave

Yes its quite a nasty one if you've left remote management open to the world. Easily fixable, but perhaps not if you've got thousands of them out there. We've already seen numerous of our customers who used Drayteks on their own suffer from this thinking it was a line issue when actually it was their router (not supplied by us btw). A rough fix is 1. Take router offline 2. If you must allow remote access to the web interface then lock this down to specific hosts. 3. I'd recommend moving the ports for remote access to something different that default. e.g. HTTPS move from port 443 to say 444. 4. Upgrade the firmware to the latest version. 5. Reconnect and your router should then be fixed and further secured. Dave