Choose from several options for complete web, email and data security.
Learn more
Evaluate Websense products by watching demos and installing evaluation software.
Learn how Websense solutions help keep our customer safe, secure and productive
Get information on product updates, support resources and more.
Get the most out of support in five simple steps.
Find tools and assets to help sell Websense solutions.
Come work for the global leader in unified information security. Go
We tried a trial of the clouded web security gateway solution, however we had some performance issues with it.
If we enabled the proxy, our internet performance degraded severely. With proxy enabled, most websites neede 5-15 seconds to load, while without proxy the loading time was <4 seconds.
To troubleshoot this issue, we tried different browsers on our Win2008 TS, some registry-tweaks founded on this forum. But all with no succes. After some more troubleshooting (other PC's, OS's and even different locations), we found out that the main site was proxying all the traffic to webdefence.cluster-g.blackspider.com, wich is located somewhere in the United States. The main site itself is located in The Netherlands and some pings show a latency of 200-300 msec between the site and the proxy. However if we moved to another location (like a remote worker) the proxy was going to cluster-a or cluster-b. Wich is far less latency (around 30-40 ms). How is it possible that the main-site is directed to a proxy far away and some remote worker at home is redirected to a 'good' proxy? And is it possible to enforce the main site to use a different proxy?
With kind regards,
Technica ICT
I too have made this mistake, Websense uses GeoDNS. So it chooses the best cluster based on DNS result
In my example I was using Google DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 even though I am based in Australia
So of course Websense was getting the American Cluster and using that as the Proxy as it should
By changing my DNS to Australian based servers, it then chose the correct Cluster in Australia.
Alternatively, if you wish to continue using alternate country choose the 2 closest clusters and use one with the other as fail back. eg in TMG you can use webdefence.cluster-a.blackspider.com as primary upstream and webdefence.cluster-b.blackspider.com as backup.
As the other poster noted, if you are utilizing webdefence.global.blackspider.com as the URL, then yes, geolocation is at work. Where you get sent is at the mercy of the local DNS server that you are using so long as you are pointing to the webdefence.global.blackspider.com domain.
You can either change the local DNS server that you point to to something that gives better geolocation results or else you can explictly stipulate the hosting facilities that you want to point to. The way we do this is within our proxy.pac file.
using the webdefence.cluster-x.global.blackspider.com for the proxy setting is the best of both worlds... if websense is doing maintenance on a hosting facility, then their global DNS load balancing will automatically shift your traffic over to a different hosting facility. While there may be increased network round trip time, at least you won't have the additional latency that browser-determined failover introduces (it's painful to failover that way...). There are some limitations with this approach (e.g., there is a situation where the global DNS load balancing doesn't kick in right away... so we actually do a combination.. Primary hosting facility is specified using the .global. form of the domain; seconary hosting facility is not.
