On Sat, 22 Aug 2015, john boris wrote:
David
Thank you for the info. This is for a large school district where the
teachers at the schools decide their lesson plan and class most likely at
home and then in the classroom find out the site is blocked for some
reason. We have no formal process in place now. From your reply you are on
the same track as me but I was looking for reinforcement on my thoughts as
I present this to the team.
Thanks for the replies
unless you can dedicate someone to it, you aren't going to be able to fix it
within that session, the best you can do is to have it working the next day, and
that would require that you have a deadline of just after the end of the school
day and implement it that same night. This means that you will have to schedule
that portion of your day for this sort of thing. if you can get buy-in for
'works two days later' it will be far less stressful for everyone concerned.
If you can have the 'this site is blocked' message be a 'hit this button to
request that it be unblocked' and auto-fill the form, it will be easier on
everyone. You will end up being bit by cases where there are multiple sites
involved and you unblock one only to discover that more are needed. all you can
do is ask the teachers to try it from the school network ahead of time.
The other option would be if your blocking technology is such that you could
enter self-service unblocking so that if they hit a block, they can click on
'unblock it for me' and have it unblocked for a few hours (including whatever
authentication you want to trust)
part of this requires everyone to think about why you are blocking things (if
it's just to protect the kids, could you accept that the instructer's machines
are much less protected?) if it's malware protection, you need to be much more
reluctant to let anyone unblock their own request.
David Lang
On Saturday, August 22, 2015, David Lang <da...@lang.hm> wrote:
What are you looking for as being 'timely'? I've seen that term applied to
a couple weeks between submission and implementation and at other times,
hours beween submission and impelmentation wasn't considered good enough :-)
Personally, I believe the most important thing is that whatever process
you have is predictable. A longer time that is predictable is going to be
more acceptable than an unpredicatable time, even if you usually are far
faster. I've seen people happier with a predictable schedule that took 3-4
days than an unpredicatable schedule that normally took 1-2 days.
Define a fixed review schedule for requests (daily, twice a week, weekly,
whatever) and make sure you stick to that schedule and have a fixed time
after the review to implement the change. make sure that everyone knows
that you meet 'monday and wednesday at 11am' and if they miss that time it
needs to be a real emergancy to get implemented before the next window.
if you were dealing with a site where the changes are driven by product
releases, I would go for a less frequent schedule (twice a week or weekly)
on the basis that they should know well in advance what they need.
If you are talking about corporate type networks full of users trying to
get out to the Internet, I would look at a daily schedule.
Try and have the request form that they send to you (or ticket) ask for
everything that you need so that you don't have to go back to them. If you
have a daily schedule, you should be willing to bounce a request back for
correction and review the next day if anything is wrong. This lets you keep
your reviews quick and predictable. If you have time to reach out and
correct a ticket, fine. But doing that too much takes away your time from
other people's requests, so you should be able to train people to submit
things with full explinations or get them bounced back.
If you have some people who tend to have standard requests, consider a
custom form that pre-fills as much as possible.
don't ask them to submit data they don't know (don't ask for source IP
addresses, ask what office they are in and if this needs to be open only
from that office or from all offices, or have the ticket system show what
IP they are submitting it from and ask if they need it from just their PC,
from their office, or from all offices, etc)
Have all review questions and implementation times update the ticket so
that the requester can see what's happening and isn't trying to call you to
ask. Make the implementation process update the ticket and notify the
requester so that you don't spend time sending notifications.
David Lang
On Sat, 22 Aug 2015, john boris wrote:
David
I am looking for the process people may have used to handle the requests
so
they are timely.
On Saturday, August 22, 2015, David Lang <da...@lang.hm> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, john boris wrote:
Here at $WORK we have a distributed Web Filtering system. We have just
started looking to streamline the process. I figured that other large
school districts have done this already or attempted it so I will ask
here.
We have 18 High Schools and 140 Elementary schools. The Filtering is
local
but managed Centrally. I am part of the team that handle the management
of
the firewalls/filtering. I know we need a way top accept the request,
review it and then affect the change to the system whether it is a local
change or one that has to be global among the group.
I know there are configuration management tools to handle the changes
but
I
am looking for people that have done this and see their process.
I am investigating using RT as the mechanism to handle the requests for
a
number of reasons but I am willing to look at other solutions. But as
this
is a private school district and our Budget year just started I have to
look at Free solutions at the start and then if we have to spend $$$ it
would be moved to next year. I figured a VM could be spun up to handle
this
as it should not be that resource intense
I can be contacted this off list if preferred. I will summarize things
for
the group when finished.
TIA
John Boris
A lonely Sysadmin trying to stay afloat.
are you looking for a configuration management tool to implement the
change, a workflow tool to handle the request/approval of the change, or
what.
You say you are using rt for request processing, what are you using for
config management if anything?
what sort of web filtering system are you using? many of them have their
own management tools.
David Lang
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