To improve control over Internet access and costs, Johannesburg independent school St Stithians has become the first educational institution in South Africa to implement Novell`s BorderManager. According to systems manager Patrick Beddy, about 2000 users make use of the campus network and access the Internet. This large user body highlights the need for centralised control and BorderManager has met the school`s criteria. "We had been looking at replacing our caching and wanted the ability to see where our users are surfing to on the `net. It`s not a case of censorship or looking over users` shoulders, but rather to see what traffic we were paying our commercial service provider for. "The previous system did not offer these facilities and were unable to monitor or have control over who was downloading games or movie or sound clips which take up a lot of traffic," says Beddy. The school has now started enforcing authentication on the proxy allowing network administrators to control and see what traffic is coming in and who is bringing in large amounts of megabytes. "BorderManager allows us to take the necessary steps to reduce the high traffic costs and keep our traffic more or less constant. Even with 100 users surfing the net simultaneously on a single 64K line BorderManager optimises usage for peak performance," says Beddy. He points out the product was selected because the school is a committed NetWare site and BorderManager forms part of the Novell stable. NetWare 3.x and the more recent IntranetWare network operating system links about 500 PCs around the campus. It fits into the school`s Novell Directory Services (NDS) tree meaning that Beddy can continue to use BorderManager as a central point of user management. "We didn`t have to make any changes and BorderManager slots nearly into our existing IT infrastructure. "We may look at using the Cyber Patrol option within BorderManager for the younger students to control their access to certain categories of web sites." Additionally, the school has implemented a laptop project whereby teachers and pupils will be using notebook computers as part of their curriculum. The network is key to ensuring that the project is successful with BorderManager playing a major role. Novell authorised reseller Dimension Data installed the St Stithian`s School network and recently upgraded the campus to accommodate 700 network points. Meanwhile, Beddy reports that BorderManager`s caching is so effective that when a hardware failure occurred recently, it was unnoticed for four days and users were running off the cache without realising it. It only came to the attention of the IT department when users of web-based e-mail services were not able to dowload their messages.
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