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Dropped Connections during Pattern Updates

Since installing multiple XG Firewalls in a multi-site environment, we have been plagued with "random" outages that last between 30-90 seconds.

I have finally correlated this with Pattern updates for either ATP, AV or IPS.  During the time of the definition updates all connectivity to the XG firewall is lost.  This actually brings down our Wide Area network and causes VoIP phones to restart looking for the phone server.

I have an open support ticket with Sophos but I'm awaiting their response.

I have changed the updates to happen less frequently (Daily), however when there are updates it still brings down the connection (albeit less often now).

Is there a way to still have automatic updates turned on but do them on a time schedule?  I find it utterly ridiculous that the system cannot do pattern updates without bringing down the entire network.

If this is "expected" behavior what have others done as workarounds?  I cannot have 30-90 seconds of downtime every other day for pattern updates. 



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  • I appreciate that ping isn't the same as TCP/UDP but it was a useful tool to get some insight into why users were complaining of lost internet connections. Should have known that Sophos would have a separate bug for ICMP in vitual fastpath!

    The one thing I can confirm, on the two sites I have just tested it, pings don't stop when there is an update and Firewall Acceleration is disabled.

  • From a network perspective, ping is always a bad tool to troubleshoot further more than "is a connection even possible?". Because looking at Ping(ICMP) is its like looking at a street with jammed traffic. Using ICMP could mean, you use a motorcycle going through the traffic and still reaching the destination, but your "real traffic (cars) cannot do this. It simply does not reflect in some cases the real world. I saw a lot of administrators struggling with this especially in the movement to towards cloud (SD-Networks) or SD-WAN. You ping, the ping will reach the destination but not at the same speed as your VOIP. And this leads you to: Nothing. No conclusion, because there could be multiple issues at the same time (Wrong rule, wrong traffic selector, wrong traffic classification etc.). Ping(ICMP shortcut sometimes everything and uses different routes. Traceroute and other tools are doing the same. I cannot remember how often i have to discuss the traceroute outputs of customers and explaining, that this is not an issue. But its a easy tool to use and gives you something. 

    To recap:

    NC-69286: ICMP times out when Firewall Acceleration is enabled

    NC-70896: Internet traffic stops every time XG has an IPS or ATP update

    Those are both the affected bug IDs. It seems to be related to the Firewall Acceleration and needs to be checked. 

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  • Any updates to these issues? We're still getting 100+ users unable to access the internet for several minutes a day due to 100% CPU usage.

  • Did you disable the Firewall acceleration? 

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  • Does it require a reboot after disabling? What are the potential performance impacts of disabling it? Why did firewall acceleration suddenly break things?

  • I answered most of those questions in this thread above. 

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  • I don't see an answer to the question of whether or not a reboot is officially required after running the disable command.

  • Reboot is not required, but connections will be dropped by entering this command. 

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  • Hi,

    is this a problem with Sophs XGS too?


    Dirk

    Systema Gesellschaft für angewandte Datentechnik mbH  // Sophos Platinum Partner
    Sophos Solution Partner since 2003
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