SchoolsBroadband

@ticktock In the latest versions of netsweeper you dont have to do that for radius integration. However I've no idea if or when btls will upgrade to that. Dave

Hi @kennysarmy Prices are very varied on what speeds you want and where you geographically are. Some prices also include firewall and filtering whereas others dont. If youd like a competitive quote with award winning filtering and security do let me know. Prices for the connectivity element are constantly coming down and will continue to do so for the next 18 months or so on average for anything on a 1gbit bearer. I also see 10gbit beaters being available nationwide and affordable prices soon too. Dave

Hi @TMBS hope you're still loving us! Understand you have to get 3 quotes of course. Dave

I'd recommend looking at your smoothwall logs to see if any user has tried to access any pages which can launch DDoS attacks for has put in a search term into Google of a similar effect. Changing your IP will fix it until the student again launches a new attack having figured out you've changed your IP's. I'd be interested to know which suppliers on here have anti-DDoS mitigation. We've just invested £250k in a new anti-DDoS solution which has saved ours and our customers bacon on numerous occasions with some whoppers of DDoS attacks coming in over the past few weeks..... Dave

No, stability, scalability, support and features.

we've now moved over 500 schools from Lightspeed to Netsweeper. The biggest issue schools have is the lists they'd made on Lightspeed. We actually migrate this over which takes quite some time and a lot of effort but we find for those non tech savvy schools it just makes their lives a lot easier. However it costs us a lot in resource to do it. My advice is plan plenty of time to test the URL's as you move them over. Lightspeed and Netsweeper URL and wildcards are slightly different so its not just the case of necessarily copying and pasting over depending on what you have in there. Good luck Dave

I can't comment on Sophos i'm afraid but I do know this is a feature available on Fortinet firewalls. Dave

We've been moving all of our customers from Lightspeed to Netsweeper and its gone pretty well. Depending on how they have it setup, you'll need to in agent, install a new certificate and replicate filtering policies. Dave

We generally see prices are higher than the ones you've said above. Certainly £4,200 for a 200Mbit line I think is good if its using BT based infrastructure. Dave

Hi, it depends what your usage profile is and what's available at the school. If no FTTC is available then you're a bit stuck. I wouldn't recommend 4G for a secondary school as you'll hammer the data usage but for a primary school it's generally ok for short periods. Depending on your usage profile you may also want to look at EoFTTC instead of FTTC as it comes with guaranteed bandwidth and you can do end to end QOS which you can't properly do with FTTC. This might be needed if the FTTC / EoFTTC speeds are poor due to distance from the cabinet. Thanks Dave

Hi @snagrat Netsweeper can definitley do this as it was launched in a recent software update. @RobMason will know if we are on a build that supports it. I think we are but I'm on holiday at the moment so will check with Rob tomorrow when I'm back. Thanks Dave

My view is that it doesn't matter where the firewall is so long as you have the same function set as you would an on premise box. As many of your know we virtualise our Fortigate firewalls in the cloud so you get all the function of those firewalls with exactly the same interface as you would onsite. The short list of benefits are Same feature set Resilient firewalls rather than single onsite No capex costs Lower on-going opex costs No need to purchase annual software licensing or alter this, that's all taken care of by our team The ability to create a WAN instantly and have a single pane of glass for ALL of your sites which means not having to update umpteen number of firewall and filter configurations The ability to scale much better than having onsite boxes as your Internet connectivity increases (which it will do). We can just "turn on the taps" for more protected UTM instantly. All software upgrades handled by another party We have certified Fortinet engineers running the platform. You can make changes yourself or we can do it for you. My view is that any onsite platform (firewall, file storage, server) etc is moving or has moved to the cloud and firewalling and filtering is just another extension of the same principle. If you want to take a look at our hosted Fortigate security and Netsweeper education specific filtering then do drop me a line as we've now 1,500 schools using it Thanks Dave

we can easily put in an IP override if we know what the IP address of the device is. If you can give that to support we should be able to sort and then debug. Thanks Dave

Hi @MrWu, if you call our Service delivery team we can chase Virgin for you. Normally we can say whether its an am or a pm appointment. AM is from 08:00 - 13:00. Thanks Dave

We too have done the same with our filtering solution

Hi @Jawloms, sorry for my late reply. Everything everyone has said is correct. Before you start changing everything please contact support to make sure its possible. In theory it all should be and we've done this numerous times before but I don't know which customer you are or which package you are in. Thanks Dave

Hi Stuart, we can give you a bigger subnet that shouldn't be a problem. If you get in touch with the support team then we can do the necessary changes for you. Regards David

I think most do I just can't find the documentation on the Openreach website at the moment As soon as I do I'll pass it on

Hi again @ITGURU all leased lines using a BT EAD or BT EAD LA do go back to the local telephone exchange unless a specific RAO2 resilient variant has been used (highly unlikely as these are pricey). It'd be pretty criminal of the LLU provider not to have a UPS in their rack in the telephone exchange but in theory this could happen. You'd need to ask the LLU provider. I'll send over the document to you later on. Thanks Dave

@ITGURU that is a very good question. I've just been trawling through BT Openreach documentation to try and find the answer but I can't. As standard BT Openreach offer resilient UPS which are physically located in a cabinet which a Communications Provider (CP) equipment is located in. They also offer SLA's associated to this UPS and power feeding those UPS's too. However I can't find what backup power they actually have within exchanges as standard. Ive been to a few in the past and i've seen some with diesel generators and multiple power supplies. Major exchanges are likely to have these but I'm unsure of smaller more rural ones. Certainly all do have UPS as a minimum. If you want me to send you BT Openreachs co-mingling product (you need to be a CP to have access to this but I'll happily send you a copy i've got this evening) which explains what they offer to CP's then I'll happily show you this which gives nice pictures and a description of eveything. My view is that you're more likely to have resilient power which last for longer at an exchange than at a cell site. Cell sites do go down quite a bit although they always have battery backup. I'm unsure how long they as standard last for. Remember quite often 4G can actually go back via the telephone exchange depending on how close you are to it. These networks do try to self heal though in the event of a cell site outage. if you want the best i'd generally say get one BT based leased line and one from a completely different carrier (e.g. Cityfibre or Virgin) and ask the different carrier if the line would go via the local BT telephone exchange (this does sometime happen!). More than happy to give any more advice if the above is helpful. Dave

Yeah that should work a treat!

Yes that's exactly how it can be done. Ports on the router can be assigned do different Fortigate virtual interfaces. In your case one or many for dmz and one or many for lan. Best do a small diagram as to how youd like it to work and send to our technical build team who will make it happen. Thanks Dave

Evening @MrWu, with our cloud based virtualised Fortigate firewalls you have EXACTLY the same access and feature set as you would do with an onsite firewall. Some of the advantages of using it in the cloud is You have a resilient service (multiple physical devices rather than a single onsite) giving more resiliency for less cost The devices we use are very large and allow you to scale up the amount of bandwidth and processing power, so no need to put a firewall in the bin when you upgrade your Internet connectivity. We do all of the software updates for you and manage the underlying OS of the device but give you full flexibility to change anything on your virtual firewall. We have multiple Fortinet Certified engineers. When it comes to firewalls we really do know what we're doing. One things the Fortigates aren't too great at doing is education specific content filtering. In particular from a reporting perspective. To get the most from them from a reporting point of view you need the additional Fortianalyzer service (we also offer this as a hosted service if required). They are though in our opinion the best UTM and NGFW appliances available on the market. We use cloud based high availability load balanced Netsweeper content filtering services. They are also better at doing HTTPS decryption on scale than Fortigate boxes. You can use the web filtering functionality on the Fortigate box but we recommend using Netsweeper instead. We've quite a few clients who use the virtualised Fortigate firewall as a wireless controller in conjunction with FortiAP's. Please check with our pre-sales team on compatibility with FortiAPs if you have some existing ones you want to use. We're not on the very latest FortiOS version but we will be upgrading in the next few months. If you've any questions feel free to get in touch. Thanks Dave

hi folks, we'd be more than happy to give you use of our board room free of charge which is in Ilkley West Yorkshire. We can fit about 20 people tops though. Let me know if you'd like it. Cheers Dave

Yeah I agree with the vast majority of that and you're right around all the positive feature points but they can now be done in the cloud. Even the different operating system bit on some virtualized utm devices. Certainly a lot of the old grid ways of doing things are in both our opinions terrible architecture and don't deliver what customers want which is what youve described but we can now do this in the cloud which is why I'm very passionate about it. I completely agree that an onsite box can do all of those things you mention but as with other applications if done correctly and with enough investment it can be done. Doing our maths though to do it properly in the cloud you need 1000 schools to pay for it including your own ISP network and engineers and data centres which I suspect is why most msps don't want to! All good though and please don't think I'm having a go at onsite sophos boxes. I quite like them just we prefer Fortinet and Netsweeper. That it from me no more debating :-)