SchoolsBroadband

Fortinet & Lightspeed are brilliant bits of kit. FYI we are going to be holding a seminar at Weetwood Hall in Leeds on Wednesday 27th March from 11am. We'll be show casing our Fortinet security, Lightspeed fitlering / MDM and also going over different WAN network designs. I'll put up an official post on this later. Lunch will be provided and we'd love to see as many techie people there as possible Both Fortinet & Lightspeed will be sending people to demonstrate the products and it will be an extremely technical session If any of you want to come do let me know! Thanks Dave

VLAN's are actually really easy. All they do is virtual make a switch in many smaller switches. An each virtual switch can't talk to each other. if you connect 2 x physical switches together and want the VLAN's to work on both they you need a VLAN trunk port on both switches which connect them together. This passes information between both physical switches for each VLAN on each switch (athough you can also say to only trunk certain VLAN's). e.g. if you had a switch on each floor of an office building and had accounts, sales and technical where you wanted to ensure that none of them could talk to each other but you only wanted 1 switch per floor instead of 3 then you'd have 3 x VLANs on each switch spanning multiple ports and connect each switch on each floor together by a trunk port. Does this make sense? If any of you are using VoIP I'd *HIGHLY* recommend putting your IP phones on a separate VLAN! FYI we can also do content filtering, security and app control on a per VLAN basis using Fortigates. Ta Dave

Some routers have SIP ALG on them which can actually cause more problems even though they are designed to help SIP via a nat'd router. If your router has ALG on by default try turn it off and that may also help fix the problem. Dave

We do hosted VoIP & SIP trunking. In fact we give a free VoIP gateway to anyone using our leased line services. I'll PM you Dave

@Marshall_IT , Lightspeed doesn't have to use a client. We generally don't install it. It quite happily integrates with AD and open directory out of the box straight away. Dave

sounds like a duplex mismatch between the Sonicwall and Lightspeed IMO Sometimes you need to set the ports at speed and duplex rather than just auto Dave

Thanks @glennda, Skibby, I'm happy to help. I'll send you over a PM. Dave

Hi, as Rob said an Ethernet Access Direct (EAD) circuit is a effectively a leased line. When a carrier installs a leased line they actually use EAD circuits that go back to the telephone exchange and then backhaul over BT's, Talk Talks or another LLU providers network. If you're doing 3 to 4 sites then you can use a few different products. 1. EAD from one site to another or in a hub and spoke topology - Layer 1. you then have a leased line into one site which is the Internet connection 2. WES aggregator. This is another variation of a hub and spoke topology on a slightly different BT Openreach product. - Layer 1 - you then have a leased line into one site which is the Internet connection 3. MPLS network - Again you can use a hub and spoke design as such. All traffic from the head site would go via one link including the Internet traffic. This would cause that link to get busier. However it depends how much bandwidth you need. If its for only 250 people at each site then its probably not that much. Give me a call if you need to have a chat I'd be happy to help as we do all of the above. Thanks Dave

+1 for Fortinet with Lightspeed here Dave

Ouch, +1 for Fortigate & Lightspeed here.

yes I'd recommend just putting a laptop into your ISPs router and removing the smoothwall temporarily. If you assign the correct IP address and gateway to your laptop and go to something like Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test you should get a decent idea of what the speed is of the line. Dave

+1 for Lightspeed here. We've done a lot of testing with them and the product is great. Lightspeed pre-filters images.google.com which quite a few content filtering systems don't by "x'ing" out any images which shouldn't be shown. We're about to launch a hosted version of their product and bundle it in with our hosted virtualised Fortigate security solution to give additional security / content filtering. We looked at quite a few systems and Lightspeed is a) cost effective b) scalable c) integrates with Apple, Android and Windows MDM and D) we've not been able to get an inappropriate image through it so far. Dave

We'll do it if you like. We normally bundle it into our broadband costs but it's only £50 a year to host a .sch.uk domain on its own and give you access to our control panel. Dave

Hi all, I do know a bit about Exa as they are our main competitors. Generally they are a pretty good company (what's that you say us saying the competition are ok?!!?) however the 1:1 contention ratio they claim they can do on ADSL is simply not true. I've spoken with multiple LA's in the past and technically showed them why via BT or O2 (both carriers they use) how it simply can't be done. How do I know this you say? Well it's simple, we use the same carriers to deliver our services. 1:1 on DSL is pure and utter rubbish, leased lines though is another matter of course. if you want 1:1 use either GEA-FTTC GEA-FTTP EFM Full fibre Also I believe via Surfprotect they can't do AD integration and different access for individual IP addresses at the same time. Not very helpful if you have a stack load of IPADs or servers that can't integrate in Windows AD and you need different policies for them..... Sorry for the slight rant, it's been rather frustrating when we've been competing against them and they've been telling the customer "porky pies" on what guaranteed speeds they can actually deliver over DSL.

Hi @synaesthesia, we've something new coming along in the next couple of months that will allow you to do room / ou and in real time as well as MDM and content filtering on ipads / android devices. If you any of you came to BETT you'll have seen what we had to offer. Watch this space Dave

Hi Speckytecky, FYI Schools Broadband is a trading name of Talk Straight. We've been in touch with a few schools in Wiltshire already. If you'd like us to pop in to say hello do let us know Thanks Dave

I must admit I was a little sceptical about it all, however I've actually been to this school and I think it's fantastic. Everyone with a "can do" attitude and it's quite amazing how they're all drawing on walls (all walls are basically whiteboards) and have apple tv's hooked up all over the place to beam lessons from a teachers ipad. The place was practically paperless. Oh the best thing though is that they also use one of our fabulous 1GIG Internet connections, much faster than the old LA Dave

Would you guys like us to put one on our stand? Quite happy to if you'd like! Dave

Ummm this may seem way too simple but are both devices at each end in the same subnet mask? Dave

You seriously don't want to know how much our stand which is 42m squared @ D322 costs this year!!!

I'd recommend the O2 boostbox or the Vodafone Suresignal. They are femtocells so you need a broadband conenction to get them working but they are easy to use and quite reliable. Dave

We're here and also at BETT stand D322

Come see us on stand D322 @ BETT. We've just our first FTTP install in Milton Keynes inc content filtering etc. Smoothwall is good but there are others as good if not better in my opinion that also doesn't have per user licensing costs which can rack up quite easily. Dave

You need to be able to do inline anti virus scanning on your VPN -> LAN traffic. This can be all done via one UTM box. Being completely biased I'd recommend Fortinet's Fortigate product although I'm sure Checkpoint, Paulo Alto and other devices also fit the bill. Dave

yup just come to the stand, say hello, get scanned and fingers crossed it could be you!