Phoenix_IT

Do you have a local proxy server? I've seen this some times where a local proxy is doing SSL inspection

Ive seen loads of companies give short notice or none at all and loads of the big named players as well that haven't even been discussed on this thread yet. As you say the value add is for every school to decide the options are there with all suppliers we just need impartial views on here rather than suppliers IMHO

Just my personal view, I'm not a fan of those tactics, and I pride myself on always recommending the best value services to my customers, I don't even sell my own services on here, just offer words of advice for school techies. As you say, there are enough people on here, and we'll never all agree with each others views as we all have different experiences

couldn't agree more, the media use the term hack to make it sound more malicious than it was - spammers are getting better at 'guessing' distribution lists etc, heck if you've ever used rainbow tables for password cracking you'll know how much easier it all is; so i suspect you are right, more a case of a missed security setting

Interesting reading peoples view on here, I think the old adage of "you can lead a horse to water" comes to mind, the lgfl content is very good and constantly being updated but i find it is mostly NQT's that like to use it, old school teachers are very stuck in their ways of finding their own materials, but lets face it, not all our teachers are IT literate. With regards to the lgfl connections, I think they offer great value for money and admit out of all the schools I support those with lgfl connections are much stabler and it is reassuring to know they take the security of schools networks seriously. For my tuppence worth I am recommending my schools go with the new offerings from lgfl, and although I agree they may not be the cheapest some times I still stand firm they offer the best value for money. I am a little concerned though at the 'personal' views of a supplier on this post though, as I would expect you to be bias to your own products, but surely products should sell themselves rather than resort to attacking competitors - reminds me of the conservatives vs labour campaigns lol

Hi @mowgli82 its more that it lists the need for TCP 5222 which I don't believe is open automatically, the exception list will only work for accessing sites over TCP 80 and 443.

Hi, not sure if you have already sorted this, but have you checked to see if tcp 5222 is open to talk.google.com as that appears to be a key part that could be stopping it from working?

I advise all my schools to go Category 2 as well as I use Teamviewer to support them, and as with Fiza I keep everything blocked in webscreen unless it is needed. Seems to work very well.

I'm not able to make it today, let those of us that can't know what happens

Student B had logged onto the machine first, then logged off, Student A then logged in; worked deleted; logged off, then Student B logged back on and continued to do their work - not cast iron, but was enough to get them to confess.

Even if you limit to the specific IP in a time frame? Thats the reason I have auditing on the networks I look after, so I can see what workstations students have logged onto - after having a lovely child who decided to log in as another child in his class and delete all there work, we tracked it all back on the audits - no internet access in this case, but the same method could be used.

I've come across this myself once, however as my DHCP leases are set to 8 hours on the wired network, and I audit the IP's students log into, I get the IP address of that workstation, then just run the report on that IP address.

To be honest, I've supported a number of schools in London, and a few have had issues will all filtering solutions until they have been trained on it. I personally don't have a problem with webscreen, once a school has confirmed what they want, I've always been able to set it up, yes the not being able to block below the .com on https sites can be a bit of a pain at times, but this is because they do not use a proxy server, the reason proxys server can is because they are effectivily doing a 'man-in-the-middle' style attack, this means they 'could' see everything you do, including your personal banking details - a reason I don't like using them, where as not using a proxy ensures the https tunnel is kept as secure as possible between your client and the website. To sum my views up, there are pro's and con's to every solution, there is not a single solution students have not been able to bypass, and not a single solution that is 100% perfect, the important thing is making sure you are training on what ever solution you are using, and at least have something in place.

Hi Paul What service are you attempting to run? Have you run a port check on the server to see that it is def listening? Normally this could mean IIS or similar either isn't running, or not configured for that port?

Hi Fez Do you have a subscription for LogMeIn Rescue? I believe that if you do, there is some other stuff that needs to be done to allow it though using USO, I don't believe the normal version of LogMeIn Rescue works without doing this (although I could be wrong, its been a while since I've dealt with LogMeIn): https://secure.logmeinrescue.com/welcome/documents/pdfs/LogMeIn_Rescue_LGfL_USO_Integration.pdf

I agree it is impossible, however if a parent takes legal action, it is down to the school/IT department to prove they have done everything possible! And yes I have seen schools go through this, and I have seen a head teacher be successfully prosecuted for failing on things like this. I'm not saying everyone HAS to have it, I'm saying you should ALWAYS speak to the child protection office at the school for anything like this, they will be best placed to advice on what steps the school wants/has in place.

Where as I agree it is not always needed, I would strongly suggest checking with your child protection officer what the school policy is, as it only takes one student to receive an explicit image, and the school can be in a lot of trouble, which always comes back to bite the IT department. It might be a long shot, but have you asked LGFL if you can continue to use their image filtering as a third party? Most companies would have methods to be able to offer those types of services at a modest price.

I'm not sure this was just London that was affected, one of my old business partners now works in US and they all had issues with Google and their searching..... Seems Google keep trailing new technologies and it buggers up various education filtering systems, I know one of my schools in Leicester had issues too

Hmmmmmm, an issue I have seen many schools look at, and normally ends up with writing a number of different scripts in order to achieve the end goal. One school I consult for from time to time, was in a similar position, however they also had another tool called 'AD-Sync' or something like this, that sync's all your USO's to your local AD, as the usernames the school use are therefore exactly the same as the Staff Mail Accounts, I simply wrote a script that once a day added the email address field by parsing the username and appending @lgflmail.org to it, as this is the underlying account name in StaffMail (means you don't need to work out the Alias the mailbox has). Of course if you don't have anything like this, you may need to create a match up of local username and StaffMail email address in a CSV file which you maintain manually, and then run a script that updates based on that each night. Hope this helps

It has a Payment Gateway for Sagepay as well, and Amazon Payments etc, generally I think it's quite a good first e-commerce solution and also has multiple delivery options which my friends seem to like

I know a number of people that use OpenCart as their free 'one stop shop', it has a clean interface, and various payment gateways including PayPal built in, so I'd say it is worth taking a look OpenCart - Open Source Shopping Cart Solution