JGoswell

A small number of customers have mentioned that they cannot access certain websites through our standard proxies. We do appreciate the frustration this will cause and we apologise for that. We have a patch to resolve this issue and the patch deployment is scheduled to start next Tuesday.

Hi both, 1) The ‘search term’ filtering behaviour should be the same between Yahoo and Google when browsing through the SSL filtering service. If you are seeing differences in search term filtering then please do provide examples to the service desk we’ll be able to investigate. 2) HTTPS sites showing a connection error rather than a filter page is how the service currently works, and is a technical restriction as we support blocking secure sites at the domain level for devices where SSL interception can’t be used (e.g. transparent BYOD devices not using an SSL filtering proxy address). In this scenario browsers don’t allow us to show a filter page. We are considering changing this in the future as more schools move to using the SSL filtering option for all devices. Thanks, Jamie

Hi, The fix for this issue has now been rolled out. As well as our testing, we have received positive customer feedback from those who logged calls with the Service Desk to confirm the issue is resolved. Thanks, Jamie

Hi @snagrat - We will be completing a rolling release of the fix for this issue this week. We expect the release to be completed by next Tuesday (10th October) Thanks, Jamie

Thanks @MicrodigitUK @Steve21 could you send me a PM with your contact details so I can get an engineer to call you? Thanks, Jamie

Hi Rabsmith, Have you called the Service Desk? They would be best place to understand your requirements and answer your questions. Alternatively, if you PM me your contact details I can get one of the team to call you. Thanks, Jamie

Hi all, I can confirm the Service Desk were able to make contact with Mimi back in May and the issue was resolved. If anybody has any further queries regarding User Based Filtering please feel free to contact the Service Desk. Jamie

Hi, We’ve identified an issue where some elements of the Google image search result page are being filtered for innocent searches, we have developed a fix that is currently being tested. The fix will be deployed to the service shortly. If you have any further questions please do contact the Service Desk.

Hi Nathan, Did you contact our Service Desk for your RM school? If not, please send me your details and I will get an engineer to call you directly. We have not seen any network issues. We did see a very busy day on our network after patch Tuesday, with some customers maxing out their individual connection’s bandwidth at times. However we still had over 50% of spare network and filtering capacity allowing customers to fully utilise their connections to download updates. Throughout the day RM served over 10TB of Windows Updates. Jamie Goswell

Hi, To confirm we have taken steps to block this on the SWGfL network. These will take affect over night. If you anybody requires help blocking it locally before then please feel free to contact us on 0845 3077870.

Hi, We have helped a number of schools successfully use Google Expeditions on Ipads. We are getting a knowledge base article prepared to give instructions on how best to use this service on our connection. If you would like any help or advice on getting the best out of Google Expeditions on your SWGfL connection please feel free to contact us on 08453077870 and our Service Desk engineers will be happy to help.

Hi all, Yes, that was an unusually large DDOS attack. A couple of customers did notice the affects for a few minutes but our new DDOS mitigation system had by then kicked in and neutralised the attack in short order. Jamie @ RM

Hi @jbunoomally Thanks for your time earlier. I can confirm we've discussed your query with our developers, who'll add this improvement to a future release. Jamie @ RM

Hi @jbunoomally Your school has a SafteyNet+ licence so you can login to it to check your bandwith usage. Jamie @ RM

Hi @MicrodigitUK If your avatar is your school’s logo, then I think I’ve identified your support ticket (I was a pupil at your school). The response you received was correct in that we’re moving from the old bandwidth monitoring tool, which you’d access via SWGfL’s ESI portal, to it being part of RM SafetyNet filtering. This will be more accurate, as it collects more data points, have a far better user interface and be easier to use, as it’s integrated in SafetyNet, as opposed to being a stand-alone tool. All schools with a SWGfL connection get a basic version of SafetyNet for free and it comes with everything mentioned above. Some schools opt for SafetyNet+ and get additional customisation options, including filtering by groups and the ability to add their own rules. We’ll work with you to investigate the intermittent access to the SWGfL portal issue you reported on your support call. We also recognise communication regarding the switch over, including from RM international, has not been great. We’d like to apologise to you for that and we’ll do our best to learn from it. Jamie @ RM

Hi @localzuk It’s can be hard to identify customers on the forum because of usernames but I think we’ve identified your support number and I’ll pick this up directly with our engineer – apologies for the delay. It seems the issue is at least partly related to Google’s recent withdrawal of its schools YouTube service. We informed all schools that use the service about this by email. We’ll be following that up with another email shortly linking to an FAQ explaining what’s happened. You can see the information we’ve already provided here: RM Education Jamie @ RM

Hi @pirran I'm sorry you've experienced an issue this morning. I understand Chris in our support team spoke with a colleague of yours this morning. As you might now know, we were unable to find a solution-wide problem and we’ve had no similar reports from other schools – given your issue was with O365, we’d expect to have heard about it pretty quickly if others were experiencing the same thing. We’re going to send over some suggestions about how to find the root of the issue – there’s a tool you could put on a machine on your network to capture info and track it down. If the problem reoccurs, please do give us a call, as we’d of course like to help if we can. Jamie @ RM

Hi @ITGURU, Regarding Google SSL, essentially, yes, what @SteveHill just said - we've an explanation here: Changes to Google SSL and RM SafetyNet | RM Education - What we do And with that, I've got to go. Jamie @ RM

Hi there @localzuk, There are a few reasons. One is because we've often developed the update ourselves and need to have all the development team available when it goes live and they don't all work weekends. It's also because we have a very large, complex network supporting thousands of schools with different requirements, technologies etc. Because of that we simply have a lot of updates to do and some need to be done quickly. Having said that, we do try to schedule updates we think are more likely to cause issues on weekends and holidays. Hope that helps. Jamie @ RM

Hi all, Just to pick up on a few of the points that have been made in the thread today: Our engineers work 24/7/365 so we always have people monitoring and managing the network. The industry standard for support desks is to be open between 8am and 6pm – we provide 3hrs more than that, as we’re available until 9pm. In respect to the issue today, a scheduled job ran at 07:45 this morning and introduced a problem. A failsafe kicked in which caused the proxy issue. It was immediately noticed by our engineers and was fixed by 08:08. We of course don’t want anyone to experience any service outage, and we’d like to apologise again, but the incident today lasted no more than 23 minutes. On RM’s service more generally, we’ve made a multi-million pound investment in a new core network this year to improve performance and ensure future capacity. The project will deliver much improved proxy performance as we now have 200 servers dedicated to that task. As far as filtering goes, we’ve comprehensively addressed the Google SSL issue as part of the development. We’re also releasing cloud hosted, user-based filtering that’ll work for schools and school groups of any size. We’ve also invested £300,000 in a DDOS prevention system. Sorry to go on a bit there but we felt we ought to respond to the comments raised by customers on the forum. Jamie @ RM

Hi all, Apologies to anyone affected by the proxy issue this morning. We noticed the issue when it started just before 08:00 this morning and put out a status update by text and email at 08:02. We were back up and running by 08:08. We updated our status page during the incident (RM Internet & E-safety Status) - you might have needed to scroll down half a screen to see the updates, depending on your device. It currently says, "Resolved - We can confirm that service has remained stable since it was restored at 08:08. Our engineers are currently working through the details of the root cause and mitigations to avoid a recurrence of such an issue." Again, we do apologies for any inconvenience you experienced during the period. Jamie @ RM

Hi, I would encourage you to log a call with us if you feel there is an issue with the Staff Proxy Service you are using. We are currently not seeing any service issues with the Staff Proxy, but are keen to work with you to identify the root cause of what you are experiencing. SWGfL Service Desk can be reached on 08453077870 (08:00 - 21:00 Mon - Fri)

Thank you for all your comments above. We are aware of and are working on a permanent resolution for 'Google Image Search' issue. Whilst the work on the permanent resolution is being completed, we will be rolling out a temporary fix tonight that is very similar to the workaround mentioned in your above comments. Thanks.

Google have switched to SSL encryption this week and so far we have received good feedback from our customers who have installed SSL certificates. If you haven’t yet installed SSL certificates then please be aware that Google appear to have made a change to SafeSearch which is allowing some pages through which it wasn’t before. We are speaking to them and will share an update as soon as we have more news. Our recommendation is to install the SSL certificates as soon as you can, following the instructions here: Changes to Google SSL and RM SafetyNet | RM Education - What we do

We have now completed our schedule of changes to begin SSL interception and testing suggests this is working successfully. If you have any questions or want to confirm SSL interception is working at your site please feel free to call the Service Desk.