[SPAM-Score-7.2] [K12OSN] differentiated internet filtering by grade level question

[Jesse McDonnell]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:02:33 -0500
Scott Sherrill <scott at remc1.org> wrote:

> Jesse McDonnell wrote:
> 
> >
> >   Any relaxing of the filtering that is implemented at school will have to be workable within our Windows and BESS environment.
> >
> 
> 
> Jesse -
> 
> Bess has the ability to have different rules depending on the machines 
> connecting.  So it is possible to have your High School machines with a 
> different set of rules vs your Elementary School machines.
> 
> What you need to do though is have static IP's for each machine - High 
> School Computer #1 always has the same IP address.  That's done with 
> reservations in your DHCP server.  Then clump your High School machines 
> together have them in a contiguous range 192.168.0.10 -> 192.168.0.100
> 
> (If you have your own hosted Bess server ) Look at  Bess' Control 
> Center. You need to make a  new zone (under Delegate Tasks) that zone 
> will have the range of your High School machine IP addresses.  You can 
> choose a differnet person to be the Adminsitrator if you want or 
> \local\root can be it too.  Once you have a separate zone, you can set 
> different blocklists (or webmail allow in your case) for just that zone.
> 
> We do web filtering for 15+ school districts with Bess.  Each district 
> has its' own list of filtering (one school wants to block games another 
> doesn't etc).
> 
> I think you what you want to do is technically possible, but will 
> require a bit of organization to pull it off.
> 
> Scott
> 
> (Who misses filtering with Squid and SquidGuard and is working on the 
> powers that be to switch ;-) )

Thanks for the BESS pointers, Scott, and Mike.  

"powers that be" are at play here, also, and past practice has been to buy turnkey packages from the bigname players and have them installed and setup by outside vendors/consultants.  Thanks everyone for all the great suggestions on alternate ways to filter and how to avoid bandwidth intensive external email.  

The idea of using internally hosted webmail makes absolute sense. We use MS Exchange Server (the version with Outlook web access) for staff email.  There are probably about 200 staff accounts. Would adding 1200 student accounts for high schoolers pose any major problems?

Thanks!

Jesse