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BigSur EAP - Compatibility with Zscaler client

Nicholas Secrier

Hello, I have reported this in the past on a different thread but, given the small number of occurrences, I decided to wait to see if subsequent releases would address the situation.

Since upgrading to BigSur one of the key applications in our at this end,  Zscaler Client Connector, has started to stop working on some BigSur devices and other others to take quite a bit of time until will establish a connection. I have isolated the issue to the Web Network Extension that seems to either fight for resources or conflict with the Zscaler ZPA ( Private Access component). As soon as I remove Sophos everything works fine and once I install Sophos back and do not install/allow Web Network Extension things are back to normal - no issues reported by Zscaler. 

With the release of 10.0.3, one of the devices that was running fine has started to exhibit the same behaviour. Fail to connect to ZPA and then become unusable until Zscaler was completely turned off.  I have read a considerable amount of details and it looks like this Web Network Extension is causing a significant amount of issues with other applications like other VPN providers, OneDrive, Google Drive etc.

It is very frustrating to see that instead of going in the right direction we seem to be going backwards and I would like to know how do you intend to address this situation.

For us, Zscaler is critical and I have around 100 devices that should be updated to BigSur in the near future, with Sophos being the only thing preventing this from happening. I would appreciate if someone from Sophos can find some time to help as raising support tickets doesn't get you anywhere given the product is still on EAP.

Another annoying issue, noticed since updating to Sophos EAP, is related to the One Drive Finder Extensions which seem to conflict with Sophos Extensions where the Office Extensions that help you identify if the file is file is local or in the cloud are no longer visible. If you disable the Sophos Extensions and then enable it back this seems to work but disappear again at the next restart.

Thank you.

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    Hi Nicholas,

    I'm genuine sorry to hear about your issues, I understand how frustrating this can be - we have struggled with some compatibility issues with VPN clients ourselves. We are aware of an API issue in the OS that caused compatibility problems with other network extensions but from our testing and other users' feedback we believed they were fixed in Big Sur 11.2

    We would love to investigate your issue more, could you please provide us with an SDU from an affected machine?

    You can upload this as follows:

    • Go into Central, find the device, and click on the generate SDU button
    • Once the sdu is uploaded, post the file name here so we can extract it and take a look
    Thank you, and sorry for the inconvenience.
  • 0 in reply to David Lancaster

    Hi David, Can you please let me know if you were able to get what you wanted out of the provided SDU? The challenge that we have here is that we need to either stop Zscaler or remove Sophos to get a device connected to the internet and to get the SDU. Is there a way to generate one from the device itself when the issues occur? Maybe we can build a more complete picture using this approach?

    Another important aspect that I have seen of the devices running Big Sur is the need to do SMC resets as their passwords to make changes to the system was no longer working... To make changes to Privacy and Security settings you have to "unlock" the config mode and the passwords were not recognised/accepted. To fix this I had to advise my colleagues to do SMC resets and in some instances even to reset the passwords....

    The interesting part is that these were reported shortly after Sophos was installed...

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  • 0 in reply to David Lancaster

    Hi David, Can you please let me know if you were able to get what you wanted out of the provided SDU? The challenge that we have here is that we need to either stop Zscaler or remove Sophos to get a device connected to the internet and to get the SDU. Is there a way to generate one from the device itself when the issues occur? Maybe we can build a more complete picture using this approach?

    Another important aspect that I have seen of the devices running Big Sur is the need to do SMC resets as their passwords to make changes to the system was no longer working... To make changes to Privacy and Security settings you have to "unlock" the config mode and the passwords were not recognised/accepted. To fix this I had to advise my colleagues to do SMC resets and in some instances even to reset the passwords....

    The interesting part is that these were reported shortly after Sophos was installed...

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