SchoolsBroadband

Hi @fiza, Ask our support guys to do a firewall trace on the packets and debug on the netsweeper platform too and we will see what a getting blocked and fix it Dave

so far 100% in 6 months and @Primus chromebooks work just fine.

if you're using a Draytek router you may want to enable VPN passthrough which may have an effect. Dave

PM'd SIPPO

not quite yet. We have a work around for this though and have a number of Chromebook schools already using Netsweeper. Full integration with G-Suite is in the development roadmap and is top priority. I don't have a fixed time for it yet but don't expect this to be long from speaking with our product manager. Dave

Hello everyone, sorry for my late replies today in full I've been in a board meeting. The majority of our issues have been with Lightspeed servers crashing (we are still working with Lightspeed on resolving this) although we do very occasionally have a router blow up (2 in the last 18 months I think) or an NNI go down from the carrier (once in the last 24 months) Some of you may scoff at this but we actually have 100% uptime on our Cisco core network providing connectivity to all direct internet access circuits (those using onsite firewall and filtering). We also have 100% uptime since the Fortigate bug (nearly 1 year ago now) on our hosted Fortigate platform. Furthermore, we've 100% uptime on our new Netsweeper filtering platform since it was launched. Some Lightspeed filters also have 100% uptime but not all as is well documented on here and our alert email updates to customers. We have a viable high speed stable solution going forward which is our Netsweeper solution. Many customers have been contacted about this already. If you haven't and you'd like more information then please do send me a PM. We have invested a huge amount in our new network and filtering platforms (many hundreds of thousands of pounds over the last 12 months) and we do not make huge profits as a business as we re-invest this into our network and staff. Thanks Dave

LA setups are very different to ours. One very big and important difference is that an LA normally dictates what internal IP addresses ranges their schools use so there are no conflicts. Where as we have schools that use the same internal IP addresses. We can't just tell all of our customers to change IP address to make them work as Lightspeed is not VLAN aware. Dave

Salesman! That hurts! I'll reply properly to all later today. Just having a board meeting. Dave

please reboot your router. If you still have an issue then call the helpdesk or send me a PM. Thanks Dave

everyone affected should now be back up and working. The faulty hardware has been swopped out and we'll conduct an investigation as to what has happened to it. Sorry for the inconvenience for those who were impacted. Dave

Both if your traffic passes through the affected aggregation router which it sounds as though for your school it does. Sorry about this we are fixing in conjunction with our data centres engineers asap. Dave

Yes, VoIP VLAN's do not go via the faulty aggregation router that has the current issues so your phones should remain unaffected if you've had this type of installation and are using VoIP. Dave

Soon. We're replacing some hardware in one of our DC's in London. We keep spare stock specifically for these instances so it can be swopped relatively quickly. Dave

Hi all, we've an issue with an aggregation router which is being investigated. This is only affecting a small number of customers, not hundreds and hundreds. It isn't Netsweeper or Lightspeed related. We'll keep you updated. Dave

Using VRRP will allow you to move the real world IP address that was on the leased line router onto the ADSL / backup connection which is a plus if you've any services pointing to your external WAN IP's. Using VRRP also gives you two routers rather than one so in the event of hardware failure of the primary router then the secondary will kick in. Whether using VRRP or not it sounds like you've only one smoothwall box so if that goes bang then you're stuck with no Internet anyway... Dave

we heavily tested Fortinets filtering on our current hosted firewalls and some much larger ones in Fortinets labs in France for 3 days solid blitzing them with all kinds of configs and unfortunately we deduced the same that to do HTTPS filtering properly you'd need some ridiculously huge Fortigates which just weren't economically viable. Shame really as the Fortinet filtering when used in conjunction with FortiAnalyzer or Forticloud for reporting is miles better than it used to be.

Hello everyone, a lot of you know me personally. You've met me, other directors, our account managers and support engineers on multiple occasions. I can categorically say to you all we have never lied and have been frank, open and honest with all of you whether we have good or bad news as I fundamentally believe that doing so is the best long term solution to relationships with our partners and customers. I'm bitterly disappointed Lightspeed have sent the email without even consulting us. I've already received a lot of supportive emails and calls from partners and customers as well as seeing many emails saying how disgusted they are that Lightspeed have contacted them and their customers in that manner. I am not going to comment further on any points raised within the email except we do not agree with them and there are very fundamental reasons as to why some of the things they've asked us to do are simply not feasible. I do not want to get into a tit for tat back and forth blame game either as that will help nobody. We will respond to all of our customers shortly (we have already gone out to partners as per the above). Giving our customers a stable, reliable and cost effective broadband, security and filtering solution is our number one priority and will continue to be so. If anyone wants a chat then feel free to give me a call as many of you have my number already. Thanks Dave

you seriously couldn't write it could you? We'll respond in due course. As you can imagine we are not happy with the email that's just gone out and are considering our options as this has come out of the blue. We will be 100% supporting our existing Lightspeed and Netsweeper products as usual. I'll put on an official response in a new thread later. Thanks Dave

Hi @fiza, yes the logger will allow you to see what's going on and block / unblock sites and CDN's when required. Support can give you access to this. Lightspeed and Netsweeper have their own default allowed and blacklisted sites per category and are different so there are some sites which were allowed with Lightspeed but blocked with Netsweeper and vice versa. if you get stuck blocking / unblocking sites then the support team is happy to help as always, alternatively feel free to PM me directly. Thanks Dave

Hi there. It depends it depends on what package you take from us. If your on a shared firewall then we manage this on your behalf but you can have your own dedicated virtual firewall you have full access to and can make any changes yourself. Dave

Do you have an onsite Fortigate firewall for use with Exa Surfprotect Quantum? If so unless I'm missing something and you've got the UTM features enabled on the Fortigate then this comes with App control and you can block all or bits of facebook.We can certainly do it on our Fortigate firewalls as standard. Dave

yes this will work and we've done on other installs too so I'm not sure why the engineers wouldn't have recommended this yet. I'll check for you. Dave

We're there all days on our stand and I'm there personally on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Feel come along to say hello and get some free coffee and chocolate whether you use fake or real badges Dave

We do quite a few of these with virgin, bt and city Prices change with bt dependent on if the line has both points terminated on the same exchange or not. Virgins wholesale prices are normally about 10% less when both ends are on net. Virgin also do a cool point to multipoint product we've used when there's a few local sites to connect back to a single location 1gbit prices should be around a couple of grand install and three and a bit grand rental if on the same exchange. Dave

PM'd dave