Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Content filtering issues being resolved today

There has been an issue with the Lightspeed network security system blocking staff access to content that it should allow. This affects only web sites that are allowed for staff but are blocked for students. YouTube is the most prominent example of this.

We have identified the cause of this behavior as being due to the system not knowing if it is staff or students logged in to a particular computer. Today we are deploying a small software program to all the computers, called the Lightspeed User Agent, which will let the network security system know who is logged into the computer so that the proper content filtering settings can be applied.

This should be in effect by tomorrow (Thursday, Aug. 14). Until then, if you are blocked from a site, look or a "Login" link near the bottom of the security warning message. Staff can click on it and log in using Novell credentials to access sites that would otherwise be restricted from students.

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