Filter Software for the School District.

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System Description

iWayPatrol is a proxy based filter.  The several school workstations connect through the building routers over the District WAN to the central office where the Internet connection is made.  The proxy hardware is located inside the firewall, if there is one.

The browser(s) on the workstations are pointed to the proxy IP-address for services including Web access.  A request to the Web goes first to the proxy and then to the filter.  Based on the user (the IP address in the Standard version or the user data base in the Advanced Filter) and the Web site -- the filter software either sends the request via the proxy to the Internet gateway or it returns a message to the workstation that the site has been blocked.

Router or firewall rules are used to assure that the user can not access the Internet through a remote proxy or some other means.

iWayPatrol works with any of the commercial Internet proxies.  If the district uses a proxy for internal IP addressing, that proxy can be used as the filter proxy.

The use of the proxy also permits caching of web pages.  With caching, web pages are stored locally.  A subsequent request for the same web site will, after some checking of the currency of the local copy, get the web page from the local disk.   This improves the average speed of Internet access and reduces the Internet traffic.  For example, in a computer lab situation, the first access over the Internet puts the assigned web site into local cache.  The subsequent 24 accesses of the same page come from the district's caching drive.

If the District has existing hardware running the Unix operating system, it is possible to add the iWayPatrol filter as software.  Alternatively the filter can be added on as a hardware/software filter box.

iTECH offers three standard filter hardware platforms. 

• The Cobalt or Gateway Qube is a very low cost alternative for the stand alone school. 

• The Sun Netra Filter Box is the recommended standard filter platform for small districts. 

• The Intel Filter Box is appropriate for small to middle sized districts. 

The hardware selection is dependent upon the number of workstations in the district, the Internet time available for students, the curricular use of the Internet, the effectiveness of caching and the number of concurrent processes that can be handled by the hardware.  The Sun and Intel solutions can be scaled in terms of memory and processor speeds.

For larger districts, hardware combinations of servers or custom hardware is usually involved.  Typically medium to large school districts can negotiate a cost effective hardware system and iTECH can add the iWayPatrol Filter Software. 

iWayPatrol can be configured with proxies in three ways;

1. If you are already using a proxy for dynamic IP addressing, for local IP translation, or for firewall purposes, the iWayPatrol filter can be attached to that proxy. For additional information about filtering with an existing proxy.

2. If you don't have a proxy yet, a proxy for filtering can be installed.  For additional information about filtering by adding a proxy.

3. If you would wish to avoid entering proxy data at the browser level, iWayPatrol can be installed in the transparent proxy mode.  For more information about filtering using a transparent proxy.