Kevin Crawley
Author's posts
May 26 2023
Service restored
Serviced was restored about 15 minutes ago. I’ll add further details here in due course. Apologies again for the disruption. Thanks, Kev
May 26 2023
Browsing issues this morning
Schools are reporting problems browsing the internet this morning. This is be investigated. Apologies for the disruption…
Apr 04 2023
Virgin major service outage
I am sure that many of you have seen in the news that Virgin Media are having problems with their broadband service. This is impacting lots of businesses and residential users. The issues occurred early this morning but was fixed by Virgin at around 8:30am.
Unfortunately around 20 minutes ago, the service dropped out again. This is impacting me at home (broadband and mobile) as well as lots of my colleagues. I can see that 21 schools on Virgin have also lost their service. Thankfully it is happening in the holiday period but of course this still causes disruption.
This problem is much wider that HFL, schools and Hertfordshire but I thought an update may be helpful for those of you who are unaware. We have no power over when this will be fixed but Virgin will be doing all they can to get this resolved as quickly as possible.
Thanks,
Kevin Crawley
Mar 21 2023
Access to Twitter
For over ten years we have allowed access to Twitter on WF1/2/3 but blocked this on WF4. This decision was made after speaking to Head Teachers and Governor groups many years ago. It is important to note of course that schools do have the capability to override these types of rules that HFL have configured centrally.
However, after recent changes to Twitter, as well as the increase in inappropriate content, we’ve decided to align Twitter with other social networking sites and make them by default, only accessible on the WF1 filtering policy. This may not work for everyone and Schools may wish to have Twitter more accessible. Rest assured that this still can be achieved by making local changes within a school’s SafetyNet account. If you need help with this, or have any related questions, please contact our Support Team in the usual way.
Thanks,
Kevin Crawley
Nov 01 2022
Firewall reboot
Good afternoon,
RM are planning to perform a reboot of the firewall cluster tonight at 10PM. The firewall will be unavailable for a short period and there will be an outage for the services through the firewall. RM are performing this change to do some diagnostics as suggested by Fortinet support.
Any queries, please get in touch.
Thanks,
Kevin Crawley and the HfL Broadband Team
Sep 12 2022
Connectivity issues from last week
The issues from last week resulting in some users experiencing intermittent web browsing drops, has been resolved.
At the start of July, RM installed a different version of Squid (software that runs over the proxy servers). Following the work, initial testing reported that the change was successful and the network was stable. However, when schools returned in September, the extra volume and types of traffic caused the load balancers to intermittently terminate internet sessions. Users could however refresh their browser and the service would then resume, but obviously this is far from ideal.
On Friday, RM subsequently rolled back from this change and all appears stable once again. We are continuing to monitor but please get in touch with us if you wish to discuss the matter further.
Thanks,
Kevin Crawley