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.

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.

• 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.

Our new baby, Netfox 3.10, took his first venture outside today. All is going well and he doesn’t seem to have caught any bugs in his venture outside. He’s growing up so fast. It won’t be long now until he’s able to go out without us holding his hand.

On a more serious note, NetFox are rolling out the product update to a handful of selected Beta sites today and tomorrow. We hope that after a thorough beta test we will be able to release the update to all of our current update subscribers.

The update process should be seamless from 3.9 to 3.10, and most sites will receive the updates automagically at the release date. Stay tuned to find out when that will be.

NetFox would like to assure our loyal customers that our 3.10 series is coming along nicely. We have been busy working away at several key pieces of the product. There have been major improvements to security, stability and performance. As a result, internal architecture of our software has evolved considerably. This major evolution has resulted in a lengthy development process, but lays the groundwork for us to build some very cool features on in the future.

Our team has paid particular attention to backwards compatibility throughout the development process. As a result existing 3.9 customers should be able to seamlessly upgrade to the 3.10 series when it is released.

We are currently working through our internal testing and quality assurance phase, and hope to begin Beta testing of the new system at selected sites very shortly.