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Client Firewall active location detection failing

Starkadder

Hello,

I'm having problems getting the Client Firewall (from Endpoint Security & Control 9) to recognize the primary location. No matter how I specify this, my laptop clients always believe they are on the Primary Location, even when the user leaves the office and uses the systems at home.

We have a fairly large WAN connected by leased lines and all served by an Active Directory DNS service. On every site our DNS refers back to the server we use to distribute our Sophos Policies. That system does not have a public IP address as it is hidden behind our firewall.

In the central configuration policy for the Firewall I am setting the Location detection by DNS. My belief being that the FQDN and IP address combination I have entered is always correct when my clients are within our network and will fail to to resolve when they are on foreign networks (like their own broadband connections). I should then be able to configure the firewall to behave differently depending upon it finding the primary location or not.

Now I'm probably doing something wrong here, but no matter how I specify the policy servers IP address, my firewall clients are always showing that the active location is the Primary location. Even when used out of the bounds of our LAN/WAN.

I have made various tests to confirm that the DNS resolution is not the cause of this and this always seems to be fine.

Has anybody else seen this behavior, or can you suggest what I may be doing wrong?

Is there a comprehensive Firewall Configuration guide available? I haven't been able to locate one as yet.

Many thanks in advance,

Paul

:1881


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    Hello Christian,

    To continue on my earlier post, I waited for an hour to see if the firewall location changed. It didn't.

    So to recap, it seems that at boot the firewall defaulted into primary location mode. Within a few seconds it realised that it could not connect to anything at all, including the host I have specified as the device which should be resolved to indicate the laptop was on the primary location. At this point it changed to secondary location.

    While this is not quite as I would expect, I can understand the reasoning.

    When I insert a network cable, even though the host is neither available, or can be resolved, the firewall returns to primary mode. That just sounds plain wrong.

    Unplugging the cable, which should make the system fall back to the same state it was in after boot, does not change the  selected location. Again, that just sounds wrong.

    I should have explained that we are trialling the Sophos firewall with a view to rolling it out to all clients in a few weeks. At the moment we have tried five or six different notebooks and they all demonstrate this behaviour. We have tinkered with numerous settings in an effort to affect this behaviour, so many I can no longer list them accurately, but nothing seems to affect this location detection behaviour.

    :1940
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  • 0

    Hello Christian,

    To continue on my earlier post, I waited for an hour to see if the firewall location changed. It didn't.

    So to recap, it seems that at boot the firewall defaulted into primary location mode. Within a few seconds it realised that it could not connect to anything at all, including the host I have specified as the device which should be resolved to indicate the laptop was on the primary location. At this point it changed to secondary location.

    While this is not quite as I would expect, I can understand the reasoning.

    When I insert a network cable, even though the host is neither available, or can be resolved, the firewall returns to primary mode. That just sounds plain wrong.

    Unplugging the cable, which should make the system fall back to the same state it was in after boot, does not change the  selected location. Again, that just sounds wrong.

    I should have explained that we are trialling the Sophos firewall with a view to rolling it out to all clients in a few weeks. At the moment we have tried five or six different notebooks and they all demonstrate this behaviour. We have tinkered with numerous settings in an effort to affect this behaviour, so many I can no longer list them accurately, but nothing seems to affect this location detection behaviour.

    :1940
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