I work at a school where we deployed DeepFreeze to laptops that were given to students for the purpose of online classes. These were also provisioned with Sophos Intercept X to monitor and restrict web access which is really more important to us than viruses on these particular deployment. However, during this past school year, our machines have experienced a lot of random freezing and we have laptops that need to be rebooted many times a day. During our investigations, we have found some of the Intercept X installations have stopped working and Sophos is no longer reporting to the cloud and also, the cloud is no longer able to communicate with the client.
I have tried to place Sophos in a separate partition that is not managed by DeepFreeze. So far I have created this unmanaged partition (Thaw Space as is called in DeepFreeze) and created softlinks in the frozen partition to corresponding directories in the Thaw Space. I have created three symbolic links to these directories:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Sophos <==> T:\Program Files (x86)\Sophos
C:\Program Files\Sophos <==> T:\Program Files\Sophos
C:\ProgramData\Sophos <==> T:\ProgramData\Sophos
Note: The symbolic links were created using the "mlink /D "C:\Program Files\Sophos" "T:\Program Files\Sophos"" command in an elevated permission Command Prompt.
Sophos churned out a warning before installing indicating that these were symbolic links and these represented a security risk. The Thaw Space partition is hidden. No problems were further encountered during install.
I thought this process would keep Intercept X updated, however, with every reboot, the last update date reverts back to the initially "Frozen by DeepFreeze" state. I assume there are other directories that are involved in the update process that I have not symlink'ed yet.
I am also aware of a White Paper handing out instructions on integrating Sophos with Deep Freeze. This is discussed in Sophos KB article KB-000033853 where it instructs to add the following command to Deep Freeze console. We have already implemented the suggested KB steps:
Alupdate.exe -ManualUpdate -NoGUI -RootPath"C:\Program Files\Sophos\AutoUpdate
My objective is to ensure Sophos can update its components without Deep Freeze blocking it.
If you have further insight into this topic it will be most appreciated.
Thanks
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