SchoolsBroadband

That's likely a firewall setting. It's not great practise to all pupils to connect to a different DNS server. We (and you if you have your own VDOM) can create a firewall rule to allow access to DNS from a specific IP (as we currently do for your domain controller).

@Sonic007 It's with our team at the moment but it may also be an idea in the evening disconnecting the LAN apart from a single PC directly into the Mikrotik router and this then sends a constant ping to the next hop after the Mikrotik router (use a tracert command to discover this). If you do that and you see the same issues then you can discount your internal network and its either router, carrier or something on our network. Thanks Dave

sure happy to help. I'll send you a PM. Dave

Latest update from the team "We are currently monitoring the first server that has been patched, since the patch has been applied this server and the other policy servers have remained stable. Once we have completed the evaluation period we will roll the patch out to the remaining servers. This will be completed today. Thank you for your continued understanding and support." Dave

@JAWLows not to my knowledge no but this could depend on your filtering policies and how they are configured. Please do give the team a call if you need help on that. Dave

Good morning everyone, I don't yet have the full details but it appears that their may be a buffer overflow bug in the latest version of Netsweeper we've deployed on some new servers. This is getting rectified by ours and Netsweeper engineers and a patch is currently being deployed. This is only affecting those on the new servers. As with any customer issue, we're very sorry for those who are affected. There's currently a link our customers can see for updates at https://hub.talk-straight.com/serverstatus.php Thanks Dave

Fortinet is great and ties into different directory services too. There's also physical fobs or mobile apps to do the MFA. Let me know if you need any pricing or more info but check out https://www.fortinet.com/products/identity-access-management/fortitoken-mobile they work with any Fortinet firewall. Dave

@Alastairb25 that certainly shouldn't be the case. Please do contact the support team to look into it for you. We are in the process of developing a new reporting engine too which gives much faster search results and is currently in beta testing. All being well that will be released Q1 / Q2 next year and will be for free for all of our customers. Thanks Dave

Hi @Alastairb25 I can assure you we don't do any type of traffic shaping on our network for general Internet usage on our network. Fast.com isn't the most reliable of speed test for big bandwidths. For best speed results use the speed test app from speedtest.net Do remember that when doing speed tests other computers in the school will also be using the Internet too so you can't use the speed they are using which is why your speed will always be slower in the day time. you can check in the evening or disconnect everyone else and plug a computer directly into our router. Thanks Dave

Hi @Jawloms (thanks for tagging me) and everyone else too who has commented. We've had an issue with a very small subset of customers to do with a certain Netsweeper cluster not performing as it should do and some customers have suffered slower speeds than normal due to that. We brought into service an additional 8 x Netsweeper servers yesterday to enhance capacity as a quick fix which should have brought all those affected back to normal speeds as of last night Thank you for your patience to those who were affected. Dave

Fortinet Firewalls are awesome Although we normally provide Netsweeper as our content filtering solution due to cost, some customers do have our hosted Fortinet firewall and filtering solution combined. It's on pairs of resilient high availability carrier grade Fortinets so much better than having a single box on site, so long as you have dual routers and resilient Internet connection of course. As the solution is hosted there's no capital costs and you can expand to much faster line speeds without having to put your old firewalls in the bin and upgrade to new ones because the ones we use are so powerful. When using Fortinet firewalls I'd also recommend the additional FortiAnalyzer service which gives you more reporting power and is excellent. Again we have a hosted version of this you can use with dedicated storage so no need to buy your own physical box. Do send me a PM if its of interest. Thanks and good luck. Dave

yes. it might also be worth seeing if your DHCP scope is getting full up or you have two DHCP servers by mistake. As others say looking in the ARP cache will show you if two MAC addresses have been given the same IP address. If you've got two different MAC addresses that relate to the router i.e. Gateway then this will definitely break stuff. Dave

Hi Sonic, I suspect you've already raised a case with out team but if not do send me a PM. I'd recommend keeping a couple of constant pings going. One to the router we supply and one to the IP of the Fortigate at the other end. Then you'll know where the packets are dropped. I'd also recommend doing this on a few different devices at the same time to see if its device specific or if its a common issue for all devices to rule that out. Also when there's an issue do a tracert command. You can then tell where your packets get up to. Might be worth doing that too whilst everything is working properly and then work you way up through the IP list by doing constant pings to see where the packet is being dropped. There could be an outside chance we have an OSPF issue on your link specifically where for some reason our router is losing its neighbour (our core) although i doubt it but will check. I'll fire you a PM over and see if I can help at all. Thanks Dave

Thanks @Maxtgw we already have our own plans for SD-WAN and link aggregation. Watch this space everyone Dave

You're welcome

Here in the UK the government and the council have paid for lots of schools to have fibre connections installed. The most recent deployment was for about 550 schools getting fibre via the RGC scheme. There's loads more with LFFN and some new schemes coming too which are upgrading schools without fibre to fibre. The only one balmy thing that is happening is that some councils are spending more money having installed one carrier some years ago and are now paying to install another carrier years later which personally I think is mad and a waste of tax payers money... Dave

Morning @RedDash16, i'd need to double check with our engineers but I believe all you need to do is to re-authenticate a user. i.e. log on again. You don't need to reboot your machines. If you lock the PC with ctrl + alt + delete and then unlock I believe it re-authenticates you and you're then given the correct policy again. There is a timeout against inactive users which will be why you see the issue you have but its easily fixable and good practise to lock your machines when not in use. if you're still stuck do send me a PM and I'll get an engineer to give you a call. Thanks Dave

Morning @Jawloms, we try to adhere to best practise with our customers so you don't use something like a /16 but we can support any private IP address range our clients wish to have, even if they are the same as our other clients. If you need any help the support team can advise on 0 11 33 222 333. We will need to add the IP's to our core and to Netsweeper. Please give us 24 hours notice as we never add the IPs during the daytime to Netsweeper in case of any issues. This means that when our customers move they don't have to change their IP address ranges unlike some other suppliers. Thanks Dave

Hi @Michael, that's not quite correct. Virgin do deliver services through BT ducts where its considerably more economically viable for them to do so. They us a product called PIA from BT Openreach where BT charge Virgin (or any other supplier) a rental fee to use their ducts. We've just used Virgin to deliver some circuits in the York area using exactly this service which saved on digging and meant a quicker install for the school. Thanks Dave

@Mrpower it is normal practise to pay for ECC's and these will be given to you once a site survey has been done. With BT Openreach it is about £2.5k which they'll pay towards the cost and then you have to pay the rest. It's different for Virgin though. The amount of ECC's you pay is dependent on the status of the partner (unless you go with Virgin direct). Some partners get £0 contribution, some £5k contribution. Because we spend a 7 figure sum with Virgin pa we get a £10k contribution from Virgin so if you came with us then these would probably be wiped off completely. Everyone is correct, you are at liberty to cancel your order should you not accept the ECC charges. If BT has already instead a line historically then it's likely there would be no ECC charges but rental charges are normally higher than Virgin based fibre. If you'd like me to take a look to see if we can get you off the ECC's from Virgin do let me know Thanks and good luck Dave

Hello, my dad had the same issue when moving to a rural house in Yorkshire. I installed for him a 2Mbps DSL and a 4G connection that could get speeds of around 5Mbps on a good day. We used a small Fortinet device to do the job. You can send different types of traffic down different links depending on latency, usage and other metrics which means you could keep your latency sensitive applications on one link and the downloads on the poor latency but faster link. I've just upgraded him from 4G to Starlink and its amazing!!!!!!! My top throughput speed has been about 340Mbps download and 20Mbps upload! Latency from recollectin is about 18ms - 25ms which is absolutely fine for remote desktop. I'd highly recommend getting it to anyone if you have no other option. However it did take us about 9 months from point of order to get it and now we have I'd have to upgrade his internal wireless (he had a max of .n!) and also his laptop only has an FE port in it so that needs replacing too! If you need any help specifying the right Fortigate Device do let me know. Thanks Dave

We look after quite a few SEN schools already. Best speak to your account manager and / or our pre-sales technical consultants to talk through your requirements in finer detail. We do a lot more than just broadband and filtering. We're experts in safeguarding and also managed security which is included in our service as standard where we believe we go over and above many of our competitors so it doesn't surprise me that we're not the cheapest. Ultimately that's down to our account manager to get that point across and what you get for your money. Thank you for considering us and do send me a DM if I an help at all. Dave

@Edu-IT they have actually. A touch over 500 schools were given free installs on the Rural Gigabit Connectivity scheme. We connected over 50 of those with the maximum ECC cost being over £50,000. There's about to be a new version of this released shortly with more schools eligible for free upgrades with all install costs paid by the DFE. Watch this space. If you'd like to know if you can get it please do let me know as I can put schools forward for it if your current connectivity is poor. Thanks Dave

What line type you need really depends on if you're a primary or secondary school. If you're a secondary school then I recommend a leased line every day of the week. For 95% of primary schools I think FTTP is more than suitable. This also follows advice from the DFE which will be released to schools shortly (I'm part of a working group on broadband specifications with them). When you look at cost of a 1000/115 FTTP with filtering and security included compared to a 100/100 leased line with the same package options they'll roughly be the same price but the 1000/115 FTTP will outperform the 100/100 leased line every day of the week. The SLA isn't quite as good as a leased line as standard but you can purchase enhanced SLA's from the carriers if need be. Fibre faults are far less than copper though and so long as the underlying ISP doesn't oversubscribe their network then it'll be fine for a primary school. We know this from experience as we've about 2,000 schools using our services and we've been offering FTTP for a number of years now using numerous carriers. @JordanT91 I do hope we've now sent you a quote! Do send me a PM if you'd like to chat through things. Thanks Dave

Hi @localzuk ours is all done on the sim as we've a private APN into our carrier partner so traffic does not go over the general Internet. No need for VPN's or anything like that, everything is done in the same way as it is with our normal customers when using FTTC or leased lines. All traffic is kept "on net". We've unlimited usage options too so your pupils can use as much data as they like. Alternatively if you didn't want to use our filtering then we offer static real world IP's on our sims too if that's of help regarding setting up VPN's etc. Thanks Dave