So long ago in a distant land I mentioned that I had chosen the Barracuda Web Filter (formerly known as their Spyware Filter) to install in our network. If you missed my past post then check out my reasons why here or look through the whol saga of web filter choices here. Well since then I have been quite busy with both work projects and personal projects. As far as personal goes I have been doing a great deal of studying on SEO, blogging, Google and Page Rank stuff so I can try to get a new personal (and not totally techy) blog off the ground ( www.beawesomeinstead.com and also ..well more than also, mainly working on my wife’s new real estate blog (www.dicksontn-realestate.com). Now my wife is brilliant so teaching her to blog has been pretty simple…In fact she usually fixes her own issues before I ever get a chance to help her…but that is all another post entirely. So back to the Barracuda…
   I set up the Web Filter off of a stub network here for testing purposes. Energize Updates and Firmware Updates went fine and then synced up the groups and users with Active Directory without issue at all. I have been testing sparaticly for some time now and it seem to be great. For the first few weeks, after putting it between the firewall and our core switch we will monitor web usage just to get a better idea of what will be blocked according to normal web usage… I am still trying to make some decisions on certain categories and whether or not they should be blocked or allowed. The main hurdle keeping me from putting the the filter into full time service (other than coming in after hours, which in my case is sometime between 10:30 pm and 5:30 am) is out Terminal Servers. you see from talking to the Barracuda technician I will need to enable Virtual IP and I need to research just a little bit more before I am comfortable doing so. The bulk of our Physicians work through the Terminal Servers using Citrix so I really want to make sure they won’t be calling me with random error message all week. Hopefully, I’ll have an update soon.
   Let me take a second and say this about the Barracuda…while functionality and doing what it should do (filter web results) seems to work great. The reporting…well it blows goats… I mean so very bad. And I know from browsing their forums that there are third party applications that I can dump logs into and..yadda, yadda, yadda..it’s not going to happen. I have enough crap to deal with already…That’s why I bought this filter, do do some work for me. Now the kind folks at Barracuda have assured me that changes are coming to that and it will be (a direct quote) “much better”… kinda give you the warm fuzzies on the inside eh?”…more to come.