Wireless Internet Providers

[lajackson]

I wonder if they have they done a filter check since the recent switch to OpenDNS?

The filter check fails every audit. The auditor tries to go to gambling dot com, is blocked, and marks the exception and the followup that blocking is working. The FM Group opens and closes a work order, and we do it all again in six months.

[russellhltn]

The filter check fails every audit.

What exactly are they seeing when it fails? Have you looked at this thread?

[lajackson]

What exactly are they seeing when it fails? Have you looked at this thread?

Nothing as described in that thread, and nothing that says anything about being blocked. And nothing that says they arrived at the URL they entered.

I will save the screen shot they send me next time.

[danpass]

I wonder if they have they done a filter check since the recent switch to OpenDNS?

The filter check fails every audit. The auditor tries to go to gambling dot com, is blocked, and marks the exception and the followup that blocking is working. The FM Group opens and closes a work order, and we do it all again in six months.

The impression I got when I was trying to get OpenDNS filtering to work, was that Hughesnet ignored local DNS preferences set in the router as well as computers. So any DNS based content filtering solution would be ineffective with Hughesnet and probably other satellite Internet services. The previous solution the church used was also DNS based.

[russellhltn]

The impression I got when I was trying to get OpenDNS filtering to work, was that Hughesnet ignored local DNS preferences set in the router as well as computers. So any DNS based content filtering solution would be ineffective with Hughesnet and probably other satellite Internet services. The previous solution the church used was also DNS based.

Since the church is using OpenDNS, you might want to install dnscrypt. It runs the DNS request over an encrypted connection so a "man in the middle" (like Hughesnet) can't mess with it.

Just be aware that it might slow down the connection. It might be the reason Hughesnet is intercepting the DNS because they're keeping a DNS server local in the receiver. Otherwise, the request has to go over the satellite adding an additional roundtrip delay.

[danpass]

It might be the reason Hughesnet is intercepting the DNS because they're keeping a DNS server local in the receiver. Otherwise, the request has to go over the satellite adding an additional roundtrip delay.

My thought as well.

[RyanGard1977]

thank you for the info. we'll see what happens.

[RyanGard1977]

So far so good with 1 week on with hughes. There was indeed an issue with the firewall and the family history center was unable to access one of the main sites, but Hughes was able to disable something on their end and access to that site was restored. Been very cloudy this week so we are down to about 15 up vs the 30-40M up but still it's doing pretty good vs the 2M down we had previously.

[danpass]

In this post, lajackson mentioned a branch using Hughesnet which fails the filter check. But yet gambling dot com gets blocked. Do you see similar behavior at your building?

If OpenDNS is doing the blocking, you should see something like this:

opendnsblock.png (17.66 KiB) Viewed 1968 times

If not, I wonder if the firewall is configured with a fallback blacklist and blocks sites from that list if the content filter fails.

[RyanGard1977]

I haven't tried that yet, will add it to my to do list. Access to the sites is no longer an issue, however the issue we are seeing now is when the FHC is trying to download a large file such as a stored microfiche file from one of the paid sites the church uses, they are encountering issues where the downloads will stall or become painfully slow (even slower than the previous service provider's sometimes 2M download) However- if during the download process we run a speed test from a separate computer (or my own laptop) from another point in the building, be it CAT-5 or wireless, we'll still see decent speeds on that speed test. There has been quite a bit of troubleshooting with hughesnet and the church contractor who is good with networks/technology- but we are not getting anywhere. The facilities manager wants to have a hughes tech come out to prove their equipment, but the contractor doesn't think that'll do much good. We are ordering a new Cisco switch (15+ port) as the old one has a few bad ports (it is a bit old) so he wants to eliminate our equipment at the building as being an issue before risking the $120 service fee of having a hughes tech come out as their customer service tech support feels everything is fine. Uggh. The issue is bad enough that if we can't resolve this soon, the facilities manager may want me to explore having the phone company bring in 2 T1s that maybe we can bind to get 3 meg- and just using that, for the sake of giving the FHC the consistent performance they need. DSL & Cable is not available for this area yet but it does look like we have had 1 T1 here in the past based upon there being a decommissioned T1 card & chassis upstairs on the tellco backboard