Surfprotect User's Guide
Surfprotect is a highly accurate web filtering system designed to grow with the internet and adapt to your particular needs.
Backed up by an extensive database of precategorised urls, its unique architecture provides realtime classification of any unknown site, ensuring a safe and responsive browsing experience.
Upon connecting to panel.surfprotect.co.uk, you will be presented with a login box asking you for your username and password. These details will have been given to you by your sales contact and can be retrieved from any of our sales or technical staff on 0845 145 1234 if you do not have them to hand.
The surfprotect web interface presents you with a persistent menu on the left hand side of your browser. All administration tasks are performed within the 'Filter Profiles' tab.
Profiles
The first thing you'll have to do in order to customise surfprotect in any way is to create a profile. Profiles allow you to define a specific range or ranges of ip addresses to apply your filtering options to, allowing you to enforce policies, for example, on a site by site basis or based on job function. To create a new profile, simply type a unique name into the input box labelled 'profile name' and click on 'Create New Profile'.
Once you have created a new profile, it should be visible in the list on the same page. Click on the 'Edit' link corresponding to the profile you want to administer and you will be directed to a page allowing you to modify it.
Profile Administration
The profile administration page is split into two main areas, allowing you to specify the ip ranges to be affected by your chosen settings and to create and apply these policies.Only ip ranges falling within those associated with your customer id are permitted as valid input you will have to inform your sales contact if you wish to surfprotect any additional services that are billed to you.
The policy lists are split into a further two groups: category, and black and white lists. Whenever surfprotect comes across a url that it does not already recognise, the page is classified according to a predefined set of categories. Since the categorisation of certain types of content as either good or bad can be extremely subjective and may be dependant on the particular user or group accessing it, we give you the ability to individually configure profiles to grant or deny to sites based on a wide variety of content types. In case you find any of the categories to cover too broad a range of sites, the black and white lists allow you to refine your filter settings to match individual urls.
There is no limit to the number of lists you can create with the 'Create New List' button, but only one of each type can be applied to a single profile at any one time. You can apply the same list simultaneously to as many profiles as you wish.
Category Lists
The category administration page displays a list of all currently defined categories. The categories with a tick next to their name are banned - to blockadditional categories, simply check the corresponding tick boxes and click on 'Save Categories'.
Black and White Lists
Black and white listing gives you tighter control than url categorisation over the content you want to allow access to. Including a url in an active list will override the normal categorisation rules and either allow or deny access to it from any ip range affected by the current profile.
All currently defined urls will appear in the main window and you can add to or remove from the list as you wish. Each url must appear on a separate line. Clicking on the 'Save List' button located below the url list will apply your changes.
Proxy Support
One of the most attractive properties of SurfProtect is its plug and play nature. Sitting inbetween your internet connection and the remote web server, it can protect every host on your network without the need for any extra configuration on your behalf. More important than the obvious convenience provided is the added security this introduces: there are no configuration options or running programs on the client side of the connection to work around to defeat the filtering.
There may, however, be situations where you wish to be surfprotected but this transparent proxying is either unattractive or not possible - internet connections provided by an ISP other than Exa Networks would most likely fall into this category. For such a scenario, we have a private HTTP proxy server which any popular web browser can be configured to use to request web pages through. While this approach would potentially provide a way to bypass our filtering, there are a number of measures which can be used combat with varying effectiveness any attempt to do so.
