anyone using WebSense

[cahelmster]

If you are using WebSense for Internet filtering, please share your experiences with the product. We are considering this product for filtering...

Thanks

 

[Bluecrack]

I am curious too? Also, what other products are people using for this and what are your thoughts/experiences with these products.

 

[cisco8565]

I am using Websense and have been using it for several years now. The product is very stable and does a great job with blocking or filtering of websites. Reporting is good but requires a lot of horsepower. Management of users, segments, computers is excellant and easier than stuff. For laughs, we installed a new segment for some of our tech people and denied them access to everything but Playboy. It took ten minutes total to deny and allow these guys, including time to start the manager utility on my computer.

I have the reporter and server installed on the same computer with MS Proxy 2 (as a caching server only). I would have installed reporter on a seperate computer, but mgmt. is concerned about the extra traffic on the backbone. At this site, I have 1,000 user license, so yes it is a fair amount of traffic. My wslogdb files, with extended logging normally are 1.5 Gb in size per month.

I am having issues with the command-line flags for reporter.exe, I am trying to archive my data to another server on the first of the month and let the users report from there. This does not work at all and Websense is working on it.

Since you can manage all of your users by NT User group, add of of your users into a group. Set your filtering scheme based on the group, and allow/deny 'special' access based on the individual ID. With 1,388 users defined in the group, the 'special' access group has less than 20 entries in it.

I am currently Beta-testing the latest version with Microsoft ISA server. But do not expect to get very far with this for now as I do not know ISA to save my life.

 

[cisco8565]

Addendum to previous:

I am beta testing Websense Enterprise v4.4 and found a new item. Block site by quota. This implies that a user can view the websites within specific categories for a limited period of time per day. Sixty minutes by default, but user settable. Websense automatically resets the minute counters at midnight and allows the user to again get to whatever site.

Also, the 'blocked' messages are much easier to customize. There is an entire chapter in the administrators' guide regarding blocked messages, which also support frames, etc... MAJOR IMPROVEMENT...

Bob

 

[cahelmster]

I have just purchased the product, but I'm trying to figure out (after briefly scanning through the docs) how they suggest to setup the different servers. I would like to know the minimum number of required servers and how the different components should be split between the servers.

Thanks

 

[cisco8565]

How to arrange servers depends on the following: How many users, what hardware is available, what topology, which integration, and are you using MSDE or SQL as your backend?

Let me know.

 

[cahelmster]

No more than 50-60 users, 4 NT4 servers (PDC, 2 BDCs, 1 member), Ethernet with PIX firewall and two of the servers run SQL 6.5.

I haven't decided whether to upgrade to SQL 7.0 or use the MSDE.

Thanks

 

[cisco8565]

You could run this all on one of the BDC's depending on hardware available. For this number of users MSDE is perfectly capable.

(I am running my setup on MSDE, because my datafiles get huge, I would love SQL but no money)

You CANNOT run this on a server with SQL 6.5 already existing, as you are already aware.

Try to pick a server that is NOT important! Reporter will ALWAYS drive the server at 100% utilization so....