Bloxx web filter - Anyone used them?

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

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As per the title really, has anyone used them, would you recommend them, are they reliable, or are there any better alternatives to the same thing?

Interested in the Bloxx web filter and media filters (running in a school environment)

The guy i spoke to made them sound very good and lured me in to wanting it but i want more opinions on them, only had 2 other people giving opinions so far, both good but 2 isn't enough when the potential spend is over £10k :p
 
1. Create a dummy company
2. Get a mate to pose as a salesman for said company
3. Learn Squid + SquidGuard
4. Say "It's going to cost 8k, which is 2k cheaper than the other options."
5. ???
6. PROFIT
 
We already run squid and squidguard but that's very different to what we're aiming for and to what they supply, what do you mean exactly?
 
We use squid to block a myriad of things, streaming media, websites, using it for black\whitelists, and a mix of firewall rules + blacklisting to block p2p\proxies, I fail to see how spending 10k on something which can essentially can be done with Squid is good value for money.

Tell me what Bloxx can do that Squid can't?

The previous content\web filtering systems I've used in the past was a solution by Symantec in the early 2000's, and a few versions of WebSense (school and corp environment) - and I have come into my current company where we use Squid, and find that it does the same as all of them, and costs nothing.
 
The £10k included the physical server it'll run on, installation, regular updates to blocking lists etc. The included media server was another physical box which would allow teachers to approve specific youtube videos for viewing by students (Youtube is currently blocked school wide to students due to the nature of a lot of the content on there)

the £10k is a per 3 years cost and the price drops + free hardware upgrade in the second 3 years.

Squid isn't appropriate for what we want, it does the job currently as we are using the local government provided internet connection and filtering on top of it and it must meet certain standards, we're looking to abandon the local government connection for something better but that means we need to sort out a much more comprehensive filtering system.

Admitedly the physical boxes they provide could be called overkill as we are almost fully virtualised here, but that said im not sure there is enough space left on our VM hosts to run both of them at the specs there saying.
 
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Yep, we use bloxx (3,000ish users) and I would recommend them.
Their tech support is excellent, and British (Scottish, to be entirely accurate). They all know their product inside out and I've never had an issue that wasn't able to be very quickly fixed via a webex session.
Only 1 hardware failure in the 3+ years we've had them which was replaced next day.

We have the occasional issue with pages being blocked inappropriately, but no system will be immune from that, and it's easy to modify this when required.

The canned reports cover pretty much everything, though depending on the number of users, the extent of use and how long you wish to keep records, you may need an external database server to ship the access logs to. For reference we can fit over a year of logs onto our TVT1750.

Not sure how you have your proxies configured, but we have 2 sites so have a pac file that directs people to their sites proxy, and will fail over to the other site in the event of one being down.
There is the facility to upload a wpad.dat to the bloxx appliance, but we are not currently using that.

If you have any questions fire away.

Little_Crow
 
Thank you Little_Crow, we would be going for the TVT1250 box i think, we have 3 proxies but only 2 would be directed through the bloxx box, one proxy is for staff and the other for students at the moment with a 3rd proxy for us in the IT office (though im not sure we would entirely need to keep it setup this way if we go down this route, want to simplify it all as the setup is completely over complicated at the moment whilst also keeping it as secure as possible)
 
We use Smoothwall here. Their filtering systems and support are excellent, and given that you can run it as a VM (and you can even setup a HA cluster for no extra cost if you really want) the costs are very competitive.

Last time we did a comparison Smoothwall was about 1/3rd the cost of Bloxx, and gave us (in our opinion) a better filtering system. The interface wasn't as pretty, but the core system seemed better. The flash filtering that they've released in the last year has been excellent at stopping unwanted flash :)
 
I'll stick a vote in for IronPort S class appliances

We run IronPort S650's and they're rock solid, excellent support & a doddle to configure.
1 proxy config for all our regular users, power users & IT. so no need for multiple appliances.

We did look at Bluecoats before & i didnt like them at all, very clunky interface & flimsy!
 
We run Bloxx.. it's ok... does what it says on the tin, I guess. I can't say it's outstanding value for money - as others have pointed out, there are cheaper alternatives (smoothwall, for one), but there are more expensive alternatives too. We're on our second box, having run the last one for 6 years.

Don't rely on it for reporting - as far as I am aware you can export the database to another server (MSSQL, Oracle.. possibly?) - if you are going to be doing reporting for anything other than ocassionally...you may need to do that - else your bloxx unit will CRAWL.
 
brainchylde said:
Don't rely on it for reporting - as far as I am aware you can export the database to another server (MSSQL, Oracle.. possibly?) - if you are going to be doing reporting for anything other than ocassionally...you may need to do that - else your bloxx unit will CRAWL.
Click to expand...

This may very well be true, but it's hard for me to comment.
Our Internet connection is governed by the NHS, so we all share a pipe to the internet. Basically from about 9am till 5pm, internet access is abysmal so it's hard to say the impact running reports have on it.
 
Used to work with bloxx, few issues, but nothing the support couldnt dial in and sort out.

Wasnt the quickest thing ever, but we had the tvt1xxx so it wasnt the best.

Had hardware replaced the same day!!

Interface is great, intuitive and great if you hate cli.

Ruddy expensive though, if you can do it in squid, then do it.
 
We run a couple of applicances, they aren't bad and were a lot cheaper than the old bluecoats they replaced.

Reliability has been ok, not really had any issues with them.
 
forgot to mention that currently just over £9000 comes out of our budget for our current connection + filtering, this would would work out at £4600 a year for just the filtering (down to £3000 a year for the second 3 years), not sure how much our connection is going to cost yet but we're trying to work something out to save money over our current provider - though either way we'll be getting a LOT more control than we currently do which is a bonus.

So cost isn't as much of an issue as it seems really.
 
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