Barracuda WTF
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So, at my new job, they have a Barracuda appliance sitting somewhere that blocks various web traffic. Fair enough, if half the office was on Youtube or Pandora, there'd be no bandwidth left to do actual work. It's more an issue of which things are blocked...
Not Blocked Blocked Twitter Facebook Github, Sourceforge Bitbucket The I Can Haz Cheezburger family of sites Every CDN (cloudfront, googleapis, etc) The StackExchange family of sites StackExchange's static content domain Fark Kotaku I can't seem to figure out the rhyme or reason for some of these. If it was halfway consistent I wouldn't care as much. But it's seemingly random what they allow. Plus, how on earth do you block CDNs in this day and age?
On the upside, I found a nice Chrome extension that can switch the proxy in use by URL, and SSH tunnels are allowed out...
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You could ask staff to remedy these issues. I am sure that they'd be happy to block the missing entries for you.
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@henke37 said:
You could ask staff to remedy these issues. I am sure that they'd be happy to block the missing entries for you.
If I knew who to ask. I don't know if the Barracuda is sitting in this office, another state, or another country. None of the options would surprise me. Plus it's easier just having the SSH tunnel.
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@bardofspoons42 said:
So, at my new job, they have a Barracuda appliance sitting somewhere that blocks various web traffic. Fair enough, if half the office was on Youtube or Pandora, there'd be no bandwidth left to do actual work. It's more an issue of which things are blocked...
Not Blocked Blocked Twitter Facebook Github, Sourceforge Bitbucket The I Can Haz Cheezburger family of sites Every CDN (cloudfront, googleapis, etc) The StackExchange family of sites StackExchange's static content domain Fark Kotaku I can't seem to figure out the rhyme or reason for some of these. If it was halfway consistent I wouldn't care as much. But it's seemingly random what they allow. Plus, how on earth do you block CDNs in this day and age?
On the upside, I found a nice Chrome extension that can switch the proxy in use by URL, and SSH tunnels are allowed out...
Such a random list of blocked items suggests that the block list is composed mainly of (1) items people complained about and/or (2) items that suck up a lot of bandwidth. #2 would explain both FB and CDNs.
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Well duh, Tweets are only 140 characters, that doesn't take up much bandwidth!
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@bardofspoons42 said:
@henke37 said:
You could ask staff to remedy these issues. I am sure that they'd be happy to block the missing entries for you.
If I knew who to ask. I don't know if the Barracuda is sitting in this office, another state, or another country. None of the options would surprise me. Plus it's easier just having the SSH tunnel.
you don't even have to ask, probably. just generate sufficient traffic for them to notice and they should know what to do
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@bardofspoons42 said:
If I knew who to ask.
Doesn't the block page have contact details? Most FWs I've seen have configurable settings for this info.
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At my workplace we have websense, which helpfully gives a reason for blocking things:
Not blocked Blocked Block reason Youtube rathergood.com Tasteless The Daily WTF Some TDWTF forum threads Sexual content notalwaysworking.com sourceforge.net Software downloads
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@Faxmachinen said:
Must be all the dicks...At my workplace we have websense, which helpfully gives a reason for blocking things:
Not blocked Blocked Block reason The Daily WTF Some TDWTF forum threads Sexual content
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@FrostCat said:
(2) items that suck up a lot of bandwidth. #2 would explain both FB and CDNs.
Facebook I can understand - that thing is a clusterfuck of web-related technologies; however, CDNs are designed to be fast, so they'll be serving compressed, minified, aggressively cached content (case in point: googleapis) so they should be sucking up less bandwidth than the company's monthly report clip art budget.
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@Ben L. said:
@FrostCat said:
(2) items that suck up a lot of bandwidth. #2 would explain both FB and CDNs.
Facebook I can understand - that thing is a clusterfuck of web-related technologies; however, CDNs are designed to be fast, so they'll be serving compressed, minified, aggressively cached content (case in point: googleapis) so they should be sucking up less bandwidth than the company's monthly report clip art budget.
My guess was based on the idea of people hitting CDNs a lot, and maybe in aggreggate using lot of bandwidth. I once worked for a place that had far too little for their needs, and they would aggressively block sites for just about any reason, including "too much" bandwidth.
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@Ben L. said:
@Faxmachinen said:
Seems obvious to me that it concerns objects that are (For some strange reason) frequently mentioned on these forums. They're usually purple, and they rhyme with a certain hobbit's name from LOTR :P.
Must be all the dicks...At my workplace we have websense, which helpfully gives a reason for blocking things:
Not blocked Blocked Block reason The Daily WTF Some TDWTF forum threads Sexual content
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@Adanine said:
Seems obvious to me that it concerns objects that are (For some strange reason) frequently mentioned on these forums. They're usually purple, and they rhyme with a certain hobbit's name from LOTR :P.
"Usually purple"?
This is no time to show your susceptibility to product placement.
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@Faxmachinen said:
At my workplace we have websense, which helpfully gives a reason for blocking things:
Not blocked Blocked Block reason The Daily WTF Some TDWTF forum threads Sexual content Well, it's a lie, of course... but we can fix that retroactively, you know?
