Hardware Limitations?

TXGARobert said:

Is there a limit to the size of the hard drive I can install the XP Firewall on?  I am using an older Dell Dimension 92xx series tower with a 2T drive in it.  The drive shows correctly in the BIOS.

The installer starts throwing " out of range " errors almost immediately upon booting from the install CD.

Not sure there is a limitation on Hard Drive size but I am going out on a limb here that the Cyberoam products do not actually have hard drives built in, not that I can see anyway. They have enough flash storage that they can install and run dual firmwares. Having a hard drive included is technically "new" to this system so there may be limitations that Sophos have partially gotten around. This would definitely need an answer from a Sophos Staff member.

TXGARobert said:

I tried a 1T drive and it appeared to work, but it sat there at 10% and proceeded to fill my screen up with ..... for almost an hour.  Ended up with a screen full of ... and no idea what percent it made it to.

 So, I dug up an old 160GB drive and tried that.  I was finally able to get this one to install to completion. 

It seems that the harddrive is configured with a massive Swap space and it does a full format of the space it uses and that's why it takes so long. The larger the drive, the longer the format. It's like right-clicking a USB stick and formatting it but de-selecting "Quick Format". It took half an hour to format my 500GB but I'm getting a different error once i'm installed on mine.

I'm going to feel really bad about saying this: Logs on the XG Firewall right now are not written to disk...at all. They are kept in a RAM pool on a First In First Out basis wherein the oldest log is deleted when it's full. It is as follows:

The logs are stored in a first in first out (FIFO) cache, with up to 1,100 logs per module being stored. When the cache for a module reaches this limit, the first 100 logs are deleted. The cache is also cleared when the firewall is rebooted.

This is being looked at and wasn't noticed till too late. UTM is going to have "minor-major" releases periodically with 9.4 coming soon which won't be a major feature rich release but heard it maybe mainly for migration to XG prep. Development is still ongoing, thankfully.

So to get around this problem, you have to use Sophos iView (which is free to use up to 100GB worth of logs then paid for after that on a perpetual license up to unlimited) which does write to disk and can be used for consolidation of logging.

I hope it's pretty high on the look at list because that is a huge drop in capabilities for the Sophos UTM/FW series.

So it's 1,100 log entries per module. So 1,100 firewall logs, 1,100 administration logs, 1,100 authentication logs and so on and so forth.

If you are based in the UK and have to comply with the prevent legislation, you have to utilise Sophos iView until logging on the XG itself is capable of storing to disk.