boombah

We don't really relax the filtering much, more relax the application control on what they can do and get rid of QoS. My view is that it is a students home and whilst we have a duty of care, we should allow them to do what they like within our parameters. So we allow steam,gaming sites, facebook games and disable QoS on youtube, facebook and any other social networking. We were using untangle to do all of this but it crashed all the time and didn't do it as well as we would have hoped. Looking for solutions now to do it better..... oh and we log everything as it is law here.

Anyone using the new Cisco 5500-x Firewalls? Price here in Thailand looks great but having troubles getting my hands on one to demo. Very little info online from actual users also. Youtube video looked pretty decent. Cheers

We are running PFSense. It was initially put in when our firewall died. We put it on an old machine to get things back up and running. That was weeks ago. I have been trying to get quotes for Fortinet, Sonicwall, Watchguard and Palo Alto in that time, I still don't have a single quote yet. Guess living in Thailand, it comes with the territory. I still think I need something at layer 7 to sort our bandwidth issues out, but PFSense has been very very good and hasn't missed a beat. As for the filtering, I have used it in the past, but as mentioned, it took a fair bit of work and it wasn't that great. I have ordered a lightspeed appliance to cover that, so we will see how that goes.

I have smoothwall and lightspeed to demo at the moment, but need to do more with bandwidth QoS. I am now about to demo Watchguard and Fortigate to see if they are a better fit. I am really struggling to find something that will make the most of our limited bandwidth and filter ok. Do either watchguard or Fortigate allow bandwith limitations by group? I want to slow youtube down for students and leave it at normal speed for teachers. Can I ask what youtube controls the watchguard misses out on? Budgetwise I don't think I can get a new firewall and web filter on different devices, so looks like I will have to compromise on either bandwidth control or the filtering. Tough decisions to be made.

Does anyone use either smoothwall or lightspeed to shape traffic? What speed Internet are you shaping, how many students and is your solution effective? We have 10Mb leased line for 400 students in a boarding school. We are looking at both Lightspeed and Smoothwall. I think I prefer the Lightspeed solution, but I don't think it does the shaping so might be a no go. Cheers

Thanks for the responses. Looking into PacketFence now, looks pretty much like what we are after, now I just have to see if we can get it working. Our switches are capable, but we have many dodgy switches that are linked to each other so it wont work just yet. It takes a while to get things sorted here in Thailand. It might be an option going forwards as well. Cheers

Hi All, Hopefully someone can help me out here with what I thought would have been a relatively easy task, but my network admin tells me he can't do it. We rolled out Ruckus wireless last summer and it has been excellent. We used PSK to authenticate against AD and we can tell who, what and where on our wireless network. Problem is, we have LAN ports all over the school and in residential buildings as both staff and students live on campus. Once we put authentication on the wireless the sessions and users went down for a while and the network was stable, but then they realised they could just plug in and go. We are a BYOD school, primarily Mac based. Essentially what I am looking for is something like the Ruckus ZD for wired networks. I would prefer to just pull all cables but have been told I can't by SLT. Our network is unable to cope with the sessions. We have only 400 students P-12 but often have over 500 devices connected during the day. Sometimes the sessions get so high that the UTM (Untangle) just crashes under the load. Anyone got any advice as to how to lock down the wired network down that I can pass on to my network admin? Cheers

Interesting and timely topic. We are currently using Untangle and had nothing but trouble, possibly due to hardware issues. I am looking at Smoothwall and Lightspeed. Lightspeed is significantly cheaper. We are doing a demo this week to see how it all goes so will be interested to see the results.

Cheers, I did do a search but didn't come up with anything..... didn't know what to search I guess. Will get the tech guys to have a look and see what they think. Anyone got reasonably priced commercial software that is decent? We are in Thailand and it is sometimes easier to buy than do in house as our guys can't support it. Cheers

Hi, We run a BYOD device school running mainly Macs. We are trying to centralize our usernames and passwords via AD. I have managed to get AD to connect to our systems (Moodle, Curriculum Mapping, Wiki's and internet filtering). The only problem I have is that people can't change their AD password on there own. I see there are commercial solutions out there but they are pretty expensive. I know on Mac server there is a website you can change it at. Anyone got any ideas on how to best do this at minimal cost? Cheers,

Hi Guys and girls, Wondering if you would be able to help me out. I will start by saying I am not a network guy. I won't go into details, but I was hoping I could get some advice on what is and what isn't suitable for our school. I am working in Thailand and communication is always an issue. We have 16 servers running in our school of 400 students. We have 2 quotes for virtualization and I have no clear idea of if they are suitable or not. I am having trouble deciphering what it actually means. These are the recommendations: IBM x3550M3 Xeon E5606, 4C 2.13GHz *2 24GB Ram IBM (2x146GB) 15K 6Gbps SAS SFF HDD Hot-Swap IBM System Storage DS3512 3x300GB IBM 2x2TB HD 7200RPM 6GB SAS NL and IBM System X 3250 M4 *2 # Quad-Core Intel Xeon E3-1270 ( 3.1 GHz) # 24 GB ECC DDR-3 Memory ( Up to 32 GB ) # RAID Controller ( 0,1) with 2x300 GB Hot-Swap SAS HDD IBM 6Gbps SAS HBA Card with 1m. SAS Cable *4 IBM System Storage DS3512 Express Encloser with 5 TB ( 5x1TB) NL-SAS ( 6Gb/s)Hot-Plug HDD Any comments, recommendations or advice would be appreciated. Cheers,

Hi Guys and Girls, Just had a Ruckus network installed here in Thailand, but I have the rather large problem of machines freezing then needing to be shut down when connecting to it. It started with a Vista machine, fair enough upgrade the drivers and or OS. Now I have 5 MacBooks and MacBook Pro's doing the same thing, generally the machines are 10.5.8 Has anyone else experienced this? We are running a ZoneDirector AP-Controller Box ZD3000 with ZoneFlex 7363 Dual-band AP's Anyone with any suggestions? Surely I shouldn't have to upgrade the OS for the machines, there must be another solution. Cheers