Industry Standard Computers Home Page
Industry Standard Computers
St. Clairsville, Ohio
(740) 695-1520
30 Years In Business - 30 Years Experience with Computers - 25 Years with Networks & Security
The oldest system builder in the area, maybe in the state!
Best Labor Rate in the Area, $25 Shop, $40 Outside

ISC's Firewall content Filtering Server Side Effects:

The following is a list of side effects? or probable "will nots" with our "Firewall content Filtering Server" system:

(If you are currently a customer behind our "Firewall content Filtering Server" and missed the information meetings click here.)

When you block 1,100,000 web sites from access you might accidentally block a "good" web site. These are 15 second fixes in our system from a web browser by the administrator.

FTP is limited. FTP is not in "any shape or form" secure. If you download FTP files on a regular basis, custom work arounds will have to be configured.

Limewire, Napster, streaming video, streaming audio is or may be blocked completely. (Rarely Radio and TV stations are blocked but if they use non-standard TCPIP protocols they will be blocked.  These instances have no work around due to the nature of firewalls. (Our firewall blocks everything; allows only what is good. 99% of all other firewalls allow all, but block only what the firewall vendor considers bad.)

Large amounts of java script with redirects can cause intermittent problems. Netscape.com is a good example. The news stories with its redirects to CBS News or somewhere else might be 500 characters long.  This actually is a Windows problem made worst by a better firewall.

Real Player and Real Player adverts are dead... they are and have been on way too many blacklist to ever fix even if you wanted to do so.  But Winamp & Windows Media Player work just fine.

Personal email accounts will generally stop working, things like Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Netscape mail IF they are configured to be download with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook express.  Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird don't seem to be affected as much or at all.  Gmail accounts work! Upgrading these free accounts from HTTP to actually POP3 accounts will remedy this problem. It is better to move all of these email addresses to actual business email accounts; it looks more professional anyway.  If you must have "web mail" accounts we can create a Gmail email account for you and it can be downloaded locally and virus scanned and de-spammed too. We have "Your own E-mail Server option too."

Email will take longer to receive because each email goes through up to 4 different scans before it gets to Windows. There will be a 1-2 second delay between email in an extremely high spam environment. The first email through the system generally takes a few seconds.

If you do a lot of web searches on questionable material, the Adult blocker will stop many of these sites from appearing due to the use of "sex language" that appears on the web sites.  Sensitivity can be adjusted downward on a company wide basis. The site can be added to the whitelist so it will never be blocked.  Pages that are in reality 40 pages of text could be blocked because even a few questionable words repeated 200 times could "Filter" the page.

VPNs, remote desktops, and many of the commercial or free remote computer management software will need reconfiguration or be dead all together.  If these are an important part of "doing business" their flaky natures will only become worst when put behind such high security.  We have alternate ways of remote management available.

When on a WAN system, all nodes will need filtering servers at each location's Internet access portal. (Locking the front door does no good when the backdoor and screen door is standing wide open!)

P2P programs and Instant Messaging can be set up to work but you basically reduce the filtering server to an porn blocker, email scanner and spam detector. Not the high security firewall and such it is designed to be. AOL is a no no! Must be removed from all company computers! People can still check AOL email without AOL.

If you do a lot of surfing on "advertisement" sites like radio or television web sites. There will be a lot of holes in the pages due to national or click through advertising being blocked.  (There are some adjustments for these if you like seeing advertisements. Sarcasm!)

Microsoft in all their greed... MSN.com will have sections blocked or you have to allow access to all of MSN's advertising and a lot of "preview" adult material, spyware and tracking.  Most spyware block lists contain parts of MSN.com. Some block all of it. This is not a bad thing to consider company wide anyway.

If you are accustomed to the "Windows" approach then it will take some getting use to the "Do it and be done with it" approach in our system; and no crashing every hour.

You are paying for our services & management, reconfiguration costs after initial set up are "paid configurations."

All Firewall content Filtering Server's are the property of ISCnetwork.com. Software is leased not purchased. You have a yearly renewal fee for services, anti virus and anti spyware updates.  Nothing concerning ISCnetwork's "Firewall content Filtering Server" is free.

All pages on this website written by employees of ISC, © Copyright 1999-2015 by Butch Walker, all rights reserved.
Do not copy or use in any way without written permission from Butch Walker.

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