[elearning] Internet Costs at School

[Russell Curr]

Neil,

We have a slow 1500/256 adsl link with iiNet, with a monthly quota of 90 gig. This is adequate since we use Papercut to control how much students can download - its an automatic process, simple to manage, and we allocate the 25 meg per week.

The big disadvanage is a 1500 kbs link is too slow.  We are looking at installing 2 x adsl lines, changing to Internode, which will give a faster link (up to a theoretical 8meg) and then balancing traffic between the 2 lines.  This is a very cheap solution and will cost approx. $300 per month (with a monthly quota of 80 gig).  Currently we only pay $149 per month, and we dont ever exceed oour quota - but we live with a slow link!

cheers
Russell

--------------------------------------------------------
Russell Curr
Network Manager
Avila College
Ph: 9831-9645
Fax: 03-9888-1202
email: russell at avila.vic.edu.au
-------------------------------------------------------

>>> neil at norwood.vic.edu.au 08/24/07 2:48 pm >>>
Our costs have gone nuts this month too - again, anonymous proxies.

Russell - who is your provider, and what do they charge you per meg?  We are
with SINA and the schools cops 9c per meg traffic charge. I budget about
$15000 traffic charge per year, and often exceed this (1500 per month, exc
January, most of holidays and a lot of December).

We use ShapeShifter on a Novell BorderManager to throttle our port 80
bandwidth but still get excessive charges through peer to peer and streams
that are not properly disconnected.  Our ISP does the accounting and I am
not convinced that their accounting is accurate.

Can anyone else share their costs management strategy, and perhaps the way
they charge students?

Regards

Neil Wallace
Norwood Secondary College

-----Original Message-----
From: sofdev-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:sofdev-bounces at edulists.com.au] 
On Behalf Of Russell Curr
Sent: Friday, 24 August 2007 2:12 PM
To: sofdev at edulists.com.au 
Subject: Re: [Year 12 SofDev] proxy servers

James

we use a combination of tools:

Papercut to control web access - works very well and we give all students 25
meg per week.
Squid to block access to a list of sites SARG to randomly check who is using
the latest proxy unblocker sites

If students do manage to bypass Squid via  proxy unblocker, then they can
only access up to their credit limit anyway.

cheers
Russell


--------------------------------------------------------
Russell Curr
Network Manager
Avila College
Ph: 9831-9645
Fax: 03-9888-1202
email: russell at avila.vic.edu.au 
-------------------------------------------------------

>>> jgy at sthelena.vic.edu.au 08/24/07 10:14 am >>>
Hi all,
 
sorry for the cross posts. 
Firstly, thanks to all the people who replied to my query last week about
Value Adding through VB programming, it was most helpful. 
I have another problem and would appreciate any advice. lately, we have had
a spate of students using proxy servers to bypass the school's internet
restrictions. Word is spreading that this can be done amongst the students
and it has proved impossible to block all sites that provide proxy access. 
 
At the moment we cancel internet access to those students we catch but we
only catch them by fluke and we don't want to end up banning large number of
students from the internet but if we let the students know these sites exist
it will advertise the fact and more will use them.
 
Has your school had these problems and does anyone have some advice on what
to do?
 
Thanking you in advance
 
James Gibney
ICT Coordinator
St Helena Secondary College
Wallowa Rd
Eltham Nth 3095
Ph 03 94388500
Fax 03 94388555
email: jgy at sthelena.vic.edu.au
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