SchoolsBroadband

you wouldn't be the first person to blame us for something when it wasn't actually the problem you thought it was so no worries. Just happy I could help Dave

err nope definitely no problems on leased lines. If you're who I think you are then your currently doing 99Mbit on your 100Mbit leased line and that's why you're seeing slow speeds and packet loss I'll send you a PM Dave

Yes our suppliers are working on it and as you can imagine we're not best pleased either. It's not just effecting us but lots of ISP's. All of our leased line customers and EoFTTC customers (standard primary connection now) are not effected. We're emailing all of our customers every hour or so with an update. Thanks for your patience. David

Hello everyone, firstly I'm very sorry for the trouble cause and secondly I'm very sorry its taken me a while to comment on this as I'm normally pretty quick but I've been away on business for a week. We did a huge upgrade to our Lightspeed cluster which was done to Improve resilience Get rid of IP conflict issues Speed up reporting Allow the platform to scale better I've spoken to my technical team and I believe the issues stem from some problems with Lightspeed patches we were told to apply which have had a knock on effect to the AD integration and also some other issues. Any of our customers should have had numerous email updates over the week keeping you constantly informed both pre and post deployment. If anyone still has a problem please send me a PM and I'll get someone to look into it straight away. I am very frustrated this issue occurred and we're doing a lot of work with Lightspeed to protect us against similar future problems during upgrades. Sorry again. Dave

Hello, Hi, We've moved quite a few schools away from link2ict already with no headaches. Pm'd Thanks Dave

Hi all, There a very good chance that we will be offering this in the near future on all of our SIM cards via a private apn. Your SIM cards will effectively be part of your school lan )set as a private clan if you like). All connecting SIM cards then get filtering as if they were onsite. Including ad integration. No proxy servers, vpn or any other settings will need to be done on the tablets or ipads if connecting via 3g. Bundles will be up to 5gig per SIM for a pretty reasonable price. Pm me if interested in becoming a beta tester. Ta Dave

Hi, can you pm me the ticket number and I'll personally check it out for you. Thanks Dave

Hi @ellsandell, I'm presuming you're a secondary school? If so we offer as standard a combined offering of virtualised Fortigate (for security, app control, QOS, VPN etc) and virtualised Lightspeed for content filtering and mobile device management to complement all of our high speed leased line connections. We've installed this in hundreds of schools across the country and numerous to replace CLEO connections in Cumbria and Lancashire. Suggest you might want to PM @IrritableTech and @Marshall_IT who normally have a few nice words to say about us Thanks Dave

"hits head against a brick wall" Sorry about that. Make sure you PM me people and I'll sort it out personally for you and as Im in a general good mood at the moment I may even give you a special "Dave Discount"

I bit slow for us today. Someone must be hammering our line downloading torrents If anyone wants a line as fast do send me a PM Dave

Thanks @bobt we'll beat any genuine quote on a like for like with a leased line. Dave

Yes the Drayteks can do load balancing and will be perfect for what you need. You can force certain traffic destinations down different lines (i.e LA server connections down the LA link and only that way but balance other general traffic) If you have a current LA connection then you won't want to perform NAT on that interface as that'll probably screw things up. I think you can do routed on one interface and then NAT on the other. I have about 200 refurb Drayteks in stock as we've ripped them out following a move of our company to cloud based filtering and us using a different onsite router to do VPLS. Let me know if you want a good price on some refurb kit Thanks Dave

Hi there, We can happily do this for you and do for a number of schools already. I'll send you a pm Thanks Dave

They'll be in touch fear not. Web help desk is on the way. Watch this space

Hello, We should be able to get this working. Forgive me.as I'm on holiday at the.moment and the internet is rubbish so I can't Google ustream. If it's from a single ip though we can do an allow all rule on the fortigate and an ignore on the lightspeed for said ip. This should allow it to work fine. Best give our support department a call. If you get no luck send me a pm with the ticket id and I'll get it checked out for you. Thanks Dave

yes ditto @Domino that should fix it

Hi @FN-GM. I'm really sorry our sales team let you down. That's certainly not normal can you send me a PM with your details please as I'd like to have a chat and find out what went wrong there. Normally we're very quick on quotes and you can always PM me for one if you haven't been in touch with an account manager already. Thanks @IrritableTech and @Marshall_IT. We've just invested a whopping half million pounds in new high end Cisco ASR routers, new POP's, new Interconnects etc and everything is running very nicely. @bobt let me know if you need any other reference sites as we've plenty over the UK. Feel free to PM me with any questions. Thanks Dave

+1 for Lightspeed here. it's great and very education friendly

So who saw some of the Internet drop off the face of the planet yesterday morning??? Many ISP's around the world were affected. Unfortunately we did as one of our smaller transit providers unfortunately hit the magic 524,288 BGP routes in its edge router BGP table and then started to delete certain new ones as the memory allocated for them filled up as they were using Cisco 7600 series routers (for many years the workhorse of many ISP BGP edge routers) which can't take more than 512k routes unless IPv6 is disabled on them :-/ So they got turned off. A brief description of what happened is below from our Technical Director Matthew Hattersley with a link giving a full explanation further below. Internet Touches Half Million Routes: Outages Possible Next Week - Renesys Essentially the issue here is the amount of memory that routers allocate to storing routes. Certain models of routers and line cards have a hard limit of 512k (Some even lower, but they are mostly gone nowadays). Others have a soft limit. A good example is the Cisco 7600 (With a RSP720-3CXL). This router for many years has been the workhorse of many ISP BGP edges. It hardy and reliable but as its been so reliable, a lot of operators have taken it for granted. By default the RSP720-3CXL allocates enough memory for 512k IPv4 routes. Leaving the leftover for IPv6 and other rarer kinds of routes (Multicast etc). Yesterday this limit was hit for a short period. At which point these routers essentially ran out of memory to store routes and starting dropping them. This meant different things for different operators as the routes dropped was largely random (Imagine loosing the default route to propagate around your network. Essentially the loss of one route looses everything). As regards the impact to Talk Straight, directly there was no effect. Our core is based upon the Cisco ASR9000range of routers, capable of around 4 million routes. However like everyone else we saw issues getting to certain upstream peers. For us this meant our customers couldn't get to Office 365 and RackSpace. Two major online applications/networks that our client base rely on. This was traced to a 3rd party 7600 series router. In order to fix this issue the upstream provider (Like many others) reallocated their memory to give more space to IPv4 routes (sacrificing IPv6 in the process). What does this mean going forwards? Well for Talk Straight / Schools Broadband, not a lot. We'll probably remove that upstream peer from our routing mix to avoid issues in the future. For the internet at large the people running these older platforms have two options. Replace their equipment or sacrifice IPv6 routing. We'll probably see a mix over the next few months, but eventually they will have to remove this kit as IPv6 isn't going anywhere." If any of you have any questions don't hesitate to get in touch. Thanks Dave

Hi @Techdw, we've quite a lot of schools moved from LGFL to us and they've been using us for years. PM me if you'd like a reference site. Thanks Dave

A bit messy for me at the moment

Hello, Lightspeed, Fortinet or a combo of both would do the trick? I'll send you a PM. Ta Dave

@craigw you are right google has thrown up problems now they are all SSL. This can still be sorted though. Get your DNS servers to force google to use the nossl option and then hey presto if your filtering product can support it you can enforce google safe search and do all the other lovely filtering you need. We do this by default on our infrastructure and it works very well indeed. See https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en You then need to start thinking about blocking DNS access to other services such as opendns to ensure your clever pupils don't get round it that way Feel free to contact me folks if you have any specific questions as we've a lot of experience with this. Thanks Dave

What does the routing table on both switches show?

Hi @Sam3773 pm'd