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Sophos UTM 9 Captive Portal and Authentication Timeout

We are experiencing an issue at 2 separate sites with the Sophos Captive Portal. At both sites, students connect their devices to a Ruckus wireless network and are presented with the Sophos captive portal in order to authenticate. The students have to re-authenticate after 15 minutes at Site A and after 30 minutes at Site B. The response from Sophos South Africa local support is, "Sophos advised there is no default timeout option for captive portal UTM 9. Feel free to contact me should you need any further assistance."

I've escalated this to Sophos international support 2 weeks ago. Waiting... zzzz

*** Sophos SG430 with Firmware version: 9.509-3 ***

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+1 colly72 over 5 years ago

We changed the Authentication Timeout in Web Filtering --> Filtering Options --> Miscellaneous and this works for us
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0 envercpt over 5 years ago in reply to colly72

Perfect. Can't believe I missed that.
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0 envercpt over 5 years ago in reply to envercpt

Even more disconcerting is that Sophos support also missed this. Again, kudos to the community.
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0 BAlfson over 5 years ago in reply to colly72

Changing the timeout for Browser Authentication in Web Filtering caused the Captive Portal to change its timeout behavior? I think this is the first I've heard of this and consider it a bug that there would be any timeout associated with the captive portal other than the 'Session expires' selection when using "Backend authentication." I would be tempted to report this as a bug if you have a paid license.

Cheers - Bob

Sophos UTM Community Moderator
Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
Gold Solution Partner since 2005

MediaSoft, Inc. USA
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0 colly72 over 5 years ago in reply to BAlfson

Yes, it does affect the timeout of the captive portal. Works really well for us, so if it's a bug, I'm happy with it!
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0 FloSupport over 5 years ago

Hi envercpt

Apologies for your negative experience with our support. Please PM me with your support case number for follow up.

Thanks to colly72 for following up with the correct configuration setting. I will bring this inquiry to our team for feedback, whether this behavior is as expected or if it's a bug.

Regards,

Florentino
Director, Global Community & Digital Support
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0 FloSupport over 5 years ago in reply to FloSupport

After further discussion, this is expected behavior with this setting. The time out occurs at 15 minutes, this would correspond to the default value of 900 seconds in the authentication timeout in the web filter settings.

Florentino
Director, Global Community & Digital Support
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0 BAlfson over 5 years ago in reply to FloSupport

Flo, that's not reasonable. The customer should not be expected to increase the Transparent Web Proxy authentication timeout to manage Captive Portal usage. I could accept that this is a failure to design, but it's not something a reasonable person would have designed. I bet the developers and testers never waited to see if/when the Captive Portal would time out. The only reasonable Captive Portal timeout is the 'Session expires' setting with "Backend authentication."

Instead of asking us to create a Feature Request to fix a failure to design, Sophos should have a policy to get things like this in the queue immediately.

Cheers - Bob

Sophos UTM Community Moderator
Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
Gold Solution Partner since 2005

MediaSoft, Inc. USA
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0 FloSupport over 5 years ago in reply to BAlfson

Hey Bob,

Thanks for your feedback and assistance with this issue. I'd be happy to assist in facilitating a conversation to discuss the matter of helping improve the experience and product for our users. I'll reach out to you to follow up further.

Best,

Flo

Florentino
Director, Global Community & Digital Support
Are you a Sophos Partner? | Product Documentation | @SophosSupport | Sign up for SMS Alerts
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