Archive for GFI

Cloud-based Web Protection from GFI now available

imageGFI recently rolled out their new Web Protection solution allowing KW Support & Consulting to deliver web security, web filtering and web bandwidth monitoring to its clients. Web Protection is integrated into the GFI RemoteManagement dashboard and is based on GFI’s award-winning GFI WebMonitor product.

Features include:

  • Web security – stop client’s end-users from accidentally visiting malicious sites pushing malware, phishing, proxies, spyware, adware, botnets, etc.
  • Web filtering – help end-suers stay productive with common-sense web browsing policies designed for the workplace. Protects the business from legal liability and reduce the risk of a security breach through proactive internet access controls.
  • Bandwidth Monitoring – automatic alerts when excessive bandwidth activity on a network is identified, so you can remediate quickly and maintain productivity.

With Web Protection integrated into the GFI RemoteManagement platform, there is no software to install at the client site, no DNS name records to create or modify, and all settings and policies are managed right from the RMM dashboard.

If a user goes to a malicious web site, this is the type of warning screen they will receive:

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GFI MAX Mail 9pm Update

I informed my customers that as of 9:00pm EST, I am being advised that “the Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle data centers are now processing messages at close to normal speed.”

That is good news. Tests that I have been running for the last few hours are indicating that things are slowly improving. Although it may take several more hours for full resolution, I am now hopeful that there will be no need to implement a backup solution to redirect mail delivery.

GFI MAX Mail issues

Most of my customers are using GFI’s MaxMail solution to provide virus and spam filtering, as well as email continuity and archiving.

Today, a customer called to report issues with sending and receiving emails. I was able to successfully connect to the server remotely, but incoming and outgoing email seemed to be at a stand still, but with no warnings or errors. I rebooted Exchange on this SBS 2008 server, with no improvement.

I then used MXToolBox to check out the status of the domain and test SMTP delivery. Voila! It reported an error in connecting to GFI’s intermediate IP addresses!

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I then called GFI Support, and the pre-recorded message informed me that I was not the only one with this issue. I also learned that GFI does have a specific URL for Blog status monitoring of GFI MAX: http://status.gfimax.com

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And here is what they are reporting:

Our engineers have been systematically assessing all of the centralized components of our service in North America, including our configuration databases, the greylisting service, our various spam and virus filtering engines, network responsiveness between datacenters, and other elements that could be causing the very slow response times of our filters.

The likely culprit from our testing is the centralized asset storage servers, which are responding more slowly than usual by nearly an order of magnitude. The engineers are investigating this in detail to determine what is causing multiple asset stores in multiple datacenters to be so affected.

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