The security toolkit provides clear and relevant practical advice to schools to ensure the safety of network users and protection for the network itself. The toolkit addresses those topics that are key to any sound security and risk management strategy. The content will be maintained and updated to ensure that it remains current and reflects the needs of the school sector.
Target Audience
Network Manager & Technicians responsible for deploying school network solutions
IT Managers and Coordinators, who manage, administrate and maintain IT solutions
School SMT responsible for the schools IT strategy, policies and procedures.
Northern Grid has produced this document to assist you in checking that your CachePilot is configured correctly. It contains a list of sites with instructions on how to test your configuration settings correctly and any actions that should be taken from performing these tests; in addition to these test instructions it also contains a list of FAQs to help answer any questions you may have about the CachePilot system.
Further information available in the document below.
The Technical Service Review is a combination of a remote diagnostic network assessment, the completion of a five minute electronic questionnaire followed by an onsite visit to carry out network audit. The onsite visit also allows discussion on any support related issues or technical questions the school may have. The audit and discussion is designed to ensure that the school is maximizing their existing broadband connection and the additional services delivered by Northern Grid.
The onsite visit is expected to take approximately two hours but this is negotiable and dependent on the results of the remote diagnostic assessment. Prior to the visit a two page questionnaire will be emailed to the technical contact to identify key information this will...
For those that weren't at the Easynet, Northern Grid Technical Seminar on the 6th of July 2010, here are the presentations and documents from the event.
How to conserve network bandwidth and improving browsing response times
Busy networks create congestion, this congestion results in poor response times when browsing the Internet. Reducing congestion is easy, simply request websites that will be accessed in the next few days or weeks to be downloaded to your Cachepilot overnight. Content is then available locally rather than connecting to a remote server across the Internet, the process for the client is 100% transparent.
Presentation given by Mark Vinnicombe, Northern Grid, at the Northern Grid technical meeting held at Hall Garth Golf & Country Club, Darlington on September 25th 2007.
To improve the resilience of the network and increase the available bandwidth of the Internet connection, Northern Grid have commissioned the installation of multiple backup links at core level creating a resilient ring for all LA?s. An additional POP has been created at Newcastle with symmetrical firewall clustering to the Middlesborough POP. The available bandwidth has been upgraded from 155M to 200M. The scheduled completion of this work is the end of February 2007 for further information refer to the attached project plan.
To improve the resilience of the network and increase the available bandwidth of the Internet connection, Northern Grid have commissioned the installation of multiple backup links at core level creating a resilient ring for all LAs.
Northern Grid hosted one of its regular technical seminars on January 25th 2007. This pdf contains the presentation given by Dave Cole of Easynet who talked about monitoring the network.
Northern Grid's Broadband Technical Officer, Mark Vinnicombe, highlights some of the performance and security problems within a school network and offers advice.
As part of its ongoing developments and improvements in providing safe online environments for teachers, pupils and other users, Northern Grid is proposing to establish a new automatic monitoring system for web and internet use.
The ICT suites are well resourced and managed. Modern well-equipped workstations run the XP operating system. The user’s desktop is securely locked down stopping unauthorised applications from being run and configuration changes being made. The domain login and application access times were all within acceptable levels. The network was very quiet as the assessment was conducted during the summer holiday period. DNS lookups and trace checks were all within expected tolerances. The server farm was effectively managed with a couple of notable exceptions. The web server was susceptible to attack and requires patching; some routine housekeeping tasks were not recently carried out. File systems had high levels of...