FoxTalk

The South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services have recently announced the “Dual ISP” program. This means that schools can choose to use a secondary ISP at their school for redundancy or performance reasons.

DECS has also announced that schools must use the same filtering system as mandated centrally and cannot use alternative filtering products. They have also stated that schools must use the standard infrastructure ISA Proxy appliances provided by DECS to manage access to a second ISP.

What are the problems with this?

When managing student activities at the school a range of tools are required. While the DECS solution may provide schools with good levels of Internet filtering, there are several other issues that must be dealt with and the following systems should be put in place.

• Internet Quota Control or Billing systems
• Detailed and effective Internet Reporting
• Auditing for student Internet access
• Auditing for staff Internet access

How can NetFox help?

If you are using NetFox currently, or are looking at doing so in the future, the above issues can be addressed. Furthermore, NetFox can be implemented to work with the DECS guidelines and ensure that you are following the correct practices.

How can NetFox be implemented to work with DECS?

There are two options for implementing NetFox with the standard DECS infrastructure.

Using the NetFox Appliance

The NetFox applicance can be placed in your network as an “intermediate” proxy server. It will perform billing and reporting as normal and can also offer additional filtering to the DECS solution. NetFox provides more filtering options than the DECS solution for example, forcing the use of safe google searches.

When implemented, NetFox will connect to the your school's ISA proxy as an upstream proxy. You will need to create a “netfox” user on your ISA server and use the “single user” upstream option in the NetFox configuration. You can also set NetFox to choose an upstream proxy depending on the site that is requested.

Using NetFox Business Online

The NetFox Business Online service will be available in South Australia around the end of August. Schools will be able to use it for reporting on staff and student Internet usage from their DECS ISA Proxy server without the need for any additional hardware. An agent is installed on the ISA proxy server which sends all logs to the NetFox Business Online servers. See our product page for more details.

Soon after launch we will be adding billing capabilities and a portal designed specifically for teaching staff to manage their students on-line.

How do I find out more?

Send us an email or give us a call if you need assistance or have questions you need answered. Our details are here.

This year at CeBIT, we did a prelaunch of the new NetFox Business Online service. Over 50 businesses signed up for the Beta trial starting in June. We also got so much interest in our product from resellers and managed service providers that we are now planning a formal reseller and affilliate program.

More details to come so stay tuned!

Once again, NetFox will be attending CeBIT.AU in Sydney. The conference, running from the 12th to the 14th of May at Sydney's Exhibition Centre, will showcase some of Australia's best and most innovating technology. Please visit us at CeBit on the South Australian stand in Hall 4, stand K40.

With our gradual push into network monitoring, NetFox has begun selling the highly acclaimed Websensor products in Australia and SE Asia. In fact, we have recently been appointed the exclusive distributor for the products in the region. See http://www.netfox.com/websensor for details.

NetFox has, this week, released the 3.10 series of its Internet reporting, billing and filtering software. This release has been a long time in the making and incorporates many enhancements and fixes.

The first release in the series, 3.10.0, includes the following major enhancements:

• Greatly improved performance: An order of magnitude performance increase has been achieved in logging web usage. This translates directly to a zippier product for all users.
• Better multi-processor support: NetFox now better leverages newer multi-core machines for greatly improved performance.
• New system management console: Getting your NetFox box configured to work on your local network is now easier than ever before.
• User accounts may have two credit balances: One balance represents the balance supplied by your school or company while the other handles credit where the user has paid for access with real cash. This greatly simplifies management of cash-backed accounts.
• Supervisors now have the ability to block or allow content, without logging in as a system administrator.
• Improved online help in the Scope interface
• Streamlined integration with LDAP or Active Directory services
• New web and/or email-based support system: allows customers and NetFox support team to better manage and resolve issues. This system includes a knowledge base which allows users to identify and resolve common matters.

Several common bugs have been fixed in this release, and a number of obscure bugs have been found and exterminated by our new testing regime.

The most recent of the NetFox 3.9 series introduced individual customer subscriptions for updates and support. Existing customers should have been provided with their username and password by now. New customers will receive their details when they complete the subscription process. If you are a current NetFox customer and have not received your login details then please contact support AT netfox.com to arrange to receive them. Your unique customer login will enable you to receive the 3.10.0 update to your existing NetFox 3.9 product and continue to receive updates for the 3.10 series.

This release is available on the NetFox update servers as of 9am on October 15th. Current update subscribers should see a two stage update over two days. On the first day the NetFox operating system is updated to the 3.10 version and on the second day the NetFox core components are updated to the 3.10 version. Users of multi-core CPUs will need to reboot in order to properly leverage enhanced multi-CPU support.

This release is not suitable for users of the Monitor coin loading system, as the revised API is not compatible with Monitor. We have addressed the issue and a fix is being trialled. In order to install the fix a NetFox support technician will visit your site and install a supplementary NetFox DLL on your Monitor system. This visit will be provided at no charge.

In addition to the major feature enhancements and bug fixes, there have been major improvements to internal architecture which will allow NetFox to achieve a faster time to market for features and improvements to meet customer needs. All of these enhancements have paved the way for a number of very interesting NetFox developments. Stay tuned to the blog in the coming weeks and months to find out more.

We are hosting a gathering for our existing customers on the 21st of October upstairs at the Brompton Hotel from 6pm. It will be a great opportunity to see the latest NetFox product developments and some exciting new developments for the future.

If you haven't got your invite yet then check our events page.

I'd like to make a warm welcome to the new members of our projects team, Keith Pitt (left) and Oli Young (centre). These guys are both Rails zealots and I'm so excited to have them on board. We have just commenced an exciting new project for GaggleHouse using the Ruby on Rails framework. More announcements will be made soon!

I will be interviewed on Fresh FM Radio (92.7) this Tuesday the 29th of July at 10am. The interview will be about the IT industry, my experiences and NetFox. Hope you can tune in!

Finally, we seem to be settled in. Our new central gathering place.

Well CeBIT is over for another year. I am really pleased with the outcomes from this years show. Now we have a lot of follow up to do. The NetFox name is starting to gain traction, too. The number of people we spoke to this year that had already heard of NetFox astounded me. If for nothing else, CeBIT is a great way to get your name out there. We took the time to make a video about some of the companies that joined us on the SA DTED stand. Thanks to Susan and Naomi!

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We have finally moved all of our servers to an Adelaide based data-centre. No more US hosting! Hopefully, this will improve speed and usability. Apologies for any issues over the last few days. They should be all resolved now!