Jon's Network

In a big acquisition, some things are bound to be neglected. Take the Packetshaper forum at techexchange.packeteer.com for example. It’s spammed regularly. On a perhaps not unrelated note, packeteer.com is offline (500 error). I would have thought Blue Coat would just 301 redirect it to Bluecoat.com but what do I know?

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The Blue Coat ProxySG began life long ago as a proxy cache by CacheFlow. Recognizing the market opportunity to secure that traffic they developed more security features and pioneered the secure web gateway. Blue Coat has their own web filter product with a perpetual license (as opposed to a subscription) which can save you lots [...]

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Blue Coat WebFilter runs on their ProxySG appliances. It is continuously updated by the WebPulse community watch cloud service to block malware hosts, rate Web content and protect both ProxySG Web gateways and remote users of ProxyClient. The cloud service also provides an optional, real-time Web content rating service to rate newly published or previously unrated Web content. To ensure accuracy, each site in the WebFilter database is classified into multiple categories, which are based on actual Web usage patterns. (Link: Blue Coat Web Filter)

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Along the lines of the free filtering you get when you use OpenDNS (that I mentioned here and here), Blue Coat has a free client designed to run on home computers: K9 Web Protection – Free Internet Filtering and Parental Controls Software

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iShared, the nifty little WAFS product that Packeteer got when they bought Tacit Networks a couple years back, will likely be dropped by Blue Coat from what I have heard. Blue Coat mentioned that they planned on rejuvenating Packetshaper as a standalone product as well as integrating some Packetshaper technologies into the ProxySG appliances. Nothing [...]

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Stan Trevena, IT director for Modesto City Schools, penned The Internet Filtering Battlefield and describes the constant struggle to keep student and faculty behavior inline with the acceptable use policy. This is important to keep students safe and to keep the district out of legal trouble. It is a great article that explains exactly how [...]

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When I found out that Fortinet and Riverbed were forming an alliance to “uniquely” address security and acceleration, I immediately thought of Blue Coat, who has been taking this WAN-optimization and security approach for about two years now. The Fortinet/Riverbed alliance just validates the Blue Coat approach in my eyes. If you watch the Office, [...]

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When Blue Coat is under full load caching, filtering, scanning, authenticating, etc. just turn off caching and the thing will cough and sputter. You see, Blue Coat was once CacheFlow and their security policy engine, SGOS, was designed under the assumption that caching would always be there. For Blue Coat, caching isn’t a feature, it’s [...]

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