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Morning Good People! Anyone have captive portal setup on Netsweeper using Azure\Entra authentication? I know this is relatively easy to setup with other filtering systems\ with on prem Active Directory but seem to be having some difficulties Cheers!

We've been asked to block AI focused mode in Google and were struggling to find a way since Netsweeper doesn't allow it to be blocked, it doesn't seem to be able to block UDM 50. We've also tried blocking Gemini completely. Has anyone been able to find a way to block it?

We have recently had Netsweeper as part of our Broadband package, we formerly used Lightspeed. We seem to be hitting a brick wall with the reporting facilities. I would like to be able to display a report of the internet activity of a specific student over a specific period, say 1 week. Is this possible because I am beginning to wonder as I don't seem to be able to drill down to pupil usage in any of the reports. Any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks, Neville .

Hello. Seeing as this forum is sponsored by Schools broadband, I thought it'll be apt to ask about Netsweeper. I've started work in the team for a multi academy trust. They've recently finished moving all the schools/colleges over to use Schools Broadband with Netsweeper as it's filtering solution. My question is aimed at the IT support teams that deploy the Netsweeper WAgent via a managed service like InTune or Google Admin. Do each of your schools have their own individual NSW-XXXXX WAgent deployed to them? If that is the case, as the trust IT support team, do you have a single admin@NSW-XXXXX login which can gain access to the configuring of all the schools? Our trust is deploying the same single NSW-AgentA WAgent across all our schools, then I'm guessing groups are sync populated with staff/students; SBB_School1_Staff_Filtering, SBB_School1_Pupil_Filtering, SBB_College1_KS3_Filtering, SBB_College1_KS4_Filtering, so on and so forth. When there's no WAgent, the user is identified as NoAuth@NSW-AgentA and gets given the highest amount of filtering as though they're a student. I'm guessing the problem is when the agent is deployed to SchoolA and CollegeC, someone who's name is John Doe (jdoe@NSW-AgentA) and Jane Doe (also jdoe@NSW-AgentA), Netsweeper couldn't tell the difference and so both are given the same SBB_x_x_filtering group. I have a suspicion that our IT department has deployed it incorrectly and I just want some clarity as to how other Trusts deploy the WAgent and administer the filtering as well as deal with FOI requests for individual schools.

Just wondering if anyone can give me some suggestions on SPAM filtering and content filtering. We currently use GFI Mail Essentials for our SPAM filter, and Netsweeper for our Content Filtering. What do other people use, what do people suggest? We also use Securus for SafeGuarding and monitoring. We have been having issues with GFI, its letting through far too much SPAM. Thanks Edd

Hi all, Having moved to Netsweeper with schools broadband, I need to redo our Pac file for our ipads etc. I have tried several pac files but all ways with errors, Can any help with simple guide or how to make pac file. This is giving me a real headache and I am running out of time. I can provide the file I have so far and take any pointers. please. Thanks in advance Stuart Purvis

Hi We use NetSweeper and Impero on our network and one of the staff is asking how do the students know that the school is monitoring the internet activity. Any help much appreciated. Thanks

Hi all Any advice please. We are an SBB customer and netsweeper are unable to offer direct support. We have PCs and AD all setup so users logging in receive the correct netsweeper policy on their windows devices as the netsweeper agent is installed. We also require the same users to be able to login to chromebooks. Ideally chromebooks are setup with the following OUs: Users>Staff & Users>Students. This way the JSON file for netsweeper can be set at user lever and the appropriate filter applied. With this setup it seemed to cause an issue with staff using a PC as the agent on the pc was showing the staff policy and the chrome browser was also pulling the JSON and showing the access is denied page and applying the default policy for netsweeper which was set to student. The setup seemed to be working until the beginning of June. SBB have not yet been able to provide a solution other than removing the JSON from google admin which then leaves us with filtering issues on chromebooks. Netsweeper were able to provide some information to me and indicated it should work along with the following information; The WAgent 4.51.53.53 for Chromebooks was released in the past few days to fix a Manifest V3 issue that impacted whatismyfilteredip_reported_ip on Chromebooks.Also, due to Google enhancing security, you need to use https for server connections, for example -d https://wagentchrome.schoolsbroadband.net in the Google admin configuration JSON. The https being added to the JSON does not work for us and the URL SBB provided that works on chromebooks is -d chromewagent.schoolsbroadband.net which also differs from netwsweeper as they have it the other way around wagentchrome Any advice would be greatly appreciated or if I have not made it clear and need to provide more info please let me know. TIA!

Hello, I was just wondering if anyone has had any joy configuring the BTLS Netsweeper Authentication Portal. I've followed their guidance and got very close to what I'm after... We are redirected to the login page and when we use our AD creds it allows us to look at the page requested, if we don't use AD creds or use erroneous creds then we are blocked from accessing the page. However, we are asked to re-enter AD creds every time we change url, I would prefer to allow the user an hour of browsing before they need to re-enter creds, has anyone else had this and was it resolved? Thanks Darren

We bought an iMac back in February, to use with a load of ipod touches. However, we haven't been able to connect to the iTunes store from the Mac in school. I tried taking it home and connected without a problem but when it got back to school the sign-in process just timed out as usual. I spoke to Apple it and they said that it must be a problem with the filtering system that we use at school. But....I can connect to the iTunes store using my windows laptop, without a problem. I gave our LA technicians a call and they said that it must be a problem with the iMac, if my windows laptop was working without a problem. I told them about using the iMac at home and they went pretty quiet. We use netsweeper and I've added some addresses for the iTunes store that I found from apple's support site, but it's still not working. I should also say that we also have problems accessing other sites when a login is required- like our VLE! Has anyone got any experience of using macs with netsweeper?? Any advice would great!

Hi everyone, First-time poster here. We are running into a bit of trouble with one of the courses that one of our IT teachers is running. They are running an a-level course this year and to complete it the students will need to run a social media campaign. The deadline is looming and the IT teacher is starting to panic, SLT are remaining quiet, and we (techs) are being pressured into making things happen. Now, social media sites are all filtered, so we are tying to figure out how to allow access to them, but restrict it to lesson time only. We obviously don't want to blanket-allow all students access as that would be chaos. We have toyed with two ideas: Individually allowing each of the student's normal profile to bypass the RM SafetyNet filter using the staff proxy. But this would mean enabling and then disabling this for each student, every week at the start and end of the lesson. Creating new, blank profiles that we can assign to students and have them constantly unfiltered, but blocking the accounts (in AD, en masse) whenever the lesson is not running, to stop the students from logging on outside of lesson. It is an Edexcel course and this is the criteria the students need to meet: 3/BC.D3 Demonstrate individual responsibility, creativity, and effective self-management in the planning and use of social media in a business context. 3/C.M3 Optimise the content, format and features of social media which meet the requirements of the plan. 3/C.P5 Produce business-related content using appropriate features of social media which meet the requirements of the plan. 3/C.P6 Review data obtained on social media usage and interaction. Has anyone out there had any experience with doing this kind of thing, maybe even with this course? Oh, and to make things worse, our enterprise provider is changing our ISP this Thursday 2nd Feb (Monday 30th Jan today), which will bring with it a new piece of filtering software (that we haven't had hands-on with yet) called NetSweeper. If anyone could give us a heads up with this new filter and if we can do what we want more simply, that would be fab. Thanks everyone, a bit of a stinker, I know! James

Hi all, Can anybody else confirm if they have these issues? We're struggling to get NSW to get to the bottom on them and provide a fix for us. It is causing no end of stress for the school DSLs/Heads who receive the prevent/porn/etc alerts. See below for a write-up of the problem I have provided to the sites with the issues. What is Happening? Your site uses a web filtering system called Netsweeper to ensure that inappropriate websites are blocked and do not reach your users. This system checks website addresses against a list of known inappropriate sites. It also performs an additional check to ensure these sites are correctly identified. This extra check involves looking up the IP address of the website to see what other websites might be using the same server. Where is the Problem? The issue is with the additional IP address check, which can lead to false positives. Many websites today utilise Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to enhance their performance, making their sites load faster and more reliably. A CDN hosts numerous websites on the same server. When Netsweeper checks an IP address, it might encounter one of these CDN servers, which can complicate the identification process. Here's where things go wrong - The CDN server can return the URL of any website it hosts as it doesn't not know the website you are attempting to access from just the IP address so returns a random virtual host url. - Sometimes, the website returned by the CDN is inappropriate or blocked by Netsweeper (for example, a pornographic site). - Even though the website the user tries to access is safe and appropriate, the system mistakenly flags it because it is inappropriate and hosted on the same CDN server. Example of the Issue with CDN Servers Let's consider an example with Cloudflare, a popular CDN service. When Netsweeper checks the IP address 172.67.216.176, the reverse lookup process resolves to the website sextasytube.net, among 500+ other domain names, otherwise known as virtual hosts. Cloudflare's servers host many different websites, and when the system performs the reverse lookup, it may return any of these hosted site addresses. If the returned hostname, such as sextasytube.net, is inappropriate, Netsweeper generates an alert. This does not necessarily block the original, safe website you were trying to access, but it does cause unnecessary alerts. Additional Issues Another issue causing alerts involves computers accessing the IP address 192.168.0.1. This is a standard internal IP address used in many local networks. However, due to incorrect DNS (Domain Name System) records, this IP address incorrectly points to the website whitepower.com. As a result, when computers try to access 192.168.0.1, Netsweeper mistakenly generates alerts because of this misconfiguration. Example Timeline Leading to a False Positive Alert 1. User Logs into the Internet - A user connects their device to the Internet. The device already has the Netsweeper filter agent installed. 2. User Attempts to Access a website - The user Googles for a site or enters the URL of a website (e.g., newswebsite.com) in their web browser and hits enter. 3. DNS Resolution - The device sends a request to a DNS server to resolve the domain name (newswebsite.com) into its corresponding IP address. - The DNS server responds with the IP address, e.g., 172.67.216.176, which is managed by a CDN like Cloudflare. 4. Netsweeper URL Check - Netsweeper intercepts the request and checks the URL (newswebsite.com) against its list of known inappropriate websites. - The URL passes this initial check because it is a safe and allowed site. 5. Netsweeper IP Address Check - Netsweeper performs an additional check by looking up the IP address (172.67.216.176) to see if it is associated with inappropriate content. - A reverse IP lookup is performed to find the hostname associated with this IP address. 6. Reverse IP Lookup Result - The reverse IP lookup returns a random hostname hosted on the same IP address. - In this case, the lookup returns sextasytube.net (a pornographic site) hosted on the CDN server. 7. Alert Generation - Because sextasytube.net is identified as inappropriate, Netsweeper generates an alert. - The alert indicates that the IP address 172.67.216.176 is associated with inappropriate content due to the presence of sextasytube.net. 8. Alert Logging - Netsweeper logs the alert internally, recording details such as the user's attempt to access newswebsite.com, the IP address involved, and the inappropriate domain found (sextasytube.net). 9. Alert Notification - The system sends an alert notification to the designated members of SLT at your site - The notification includes information about the user's access attempt, the IP address, and the inappropriate domain detected.

Don't think this has been mentioned here, so thought I'd post it in case others are interested... Netsweeper blocking the EduGeek ads has been bugging me since it was implemented, but have finally decided to look at the page source... If you want to enable them, add the following URL to the Allowed URLs: http://collective-media.net I have an ad blocker for all other sites, but like to support this one when I can...