SFOS 16.01.0 known IPS issue - Work arounds?

Hi Darrian,

To get a broader view on this, take SSH to XG and go to option 4. Device console and execute the command, show ips-settings. Post the output.

Which XG hardware model do you use and what is the number of concurrent active connection on XG when this issue is live? If there are some legitimate traffic being dropped through IPS, check in the Log Viewer>IPS page and allow the signature in the IPS policy.

Thanks

Hi, 

As requested: 

-------------IPS Settings-------------                                                              
        stream on                                                                                   
        lowmem on                                                                                   
        maxsesbytes 0                                                                               
        maxpkts 80                                                                                  
        mmap on                                                                                     
        enable_appsignatures on                                                                     
        http_response_scan_limit  65535                                                             
                                                                                                    
                                                                                                    
-------------IPS Instances------------                                                              
IPS CPU                                                                                             
 1  0                                                               

The issue is being experienced mainly on a PC (3GB RAM, dual core CPU @ 2.0GHz) running Sophos XG 16.1.01. The issue starts as soon as the IPS Service starts, and only 1 connection. 

                                

Hey rfcat,

I have 8gb of RAM, quad-core (I think), and SSD.  When I get home I can give you the exact hardware specs.  Do the logs make you think this is a RAM issue?

Sorry to hear about your IPS.  Did you have to disable the service, or just not enable it on your firewall rules?  I bought an SSD specifically so that it could do IPS quickly.

I noticed that when I turned off the IPS service, the hardware utilization dropped tremendously and the continual spiking stopped.  CPU load averages around .3 or .4.  Presumably the spiking is due to the IPS service constantly restarting itself.  

Wish someone from Sophos would help us out.  I work in IT and I've had Sophos try to sell me on this product for enterprise environments.  I want to like it because it is available for home use, and that I can train myself on it.  More companies should do that.

Thanks,

Jared

I have 3GB of RAM only, and a dual core cpu. v15 ran perfectly, v16 introduced this issue. I also get the spiking of CPU and RAM usage if I try start the service, and it "flaps" up and down (started and stopped) constantly. If I disable the service (which is how I run it at the moment), I have a perfectly smooth and happy experience. I considered the hardware being a bottleneck, but it ran V15 perfectly, so I can't see that being a problem. I also only have 2 users and at most 10 devices on the network, connected to a 10mbps DSL connection, so it's not like I'm pounding many users through it. 

I've fiddled with it and I just can't get to the bottom of it. As I've said, my production CR300ing XP at work handles SFOS like a champ, no issues at all. 

Darrian,

I have at home a box with 4 GB of RAM and 4 cores and IPS is working with no issue. IPS is applied to LAN to WAN traffic and between VLANs (the devices on the other side are not always turned on).

XG however should run even with 2 GB of RAM because UTM 100/110/120 have only 2 GB, so something is not working on snort. :-(

Waiting for a reply from sachingurung or varunparikh that should investigate on this and collect logs even from home users because there are several threads where snort is not working as expected in terms of performance.

Hi Luk,

you cannot buy a new UTM 120 and from many entries in the utm forums they don't perform very well and need to be upgraded to 4gb which they physically can't. With 2gb and any amount of configured features on a reasonable speed link the UTM 120 will swap like mad affect performance.

Minimum recommended for UTM is 4gb, disk speed doesn't have much bearing except if your box starts swapping then it is time to increase memory. On the UTM forum there are many threads on performance and box sizing. Search for some of Williams old threads.

Thank you Rfcat for your reply.

XG runs even on XG85 and XG105 appliances which both have only 2 GB of RAM. As you said, it can be the ram frequency speed but however the amount of RAM taken by the IPS engine at the moment brings down even bigger appliances (some users have problem with SG310 clustered where IPS is taking 100% of CPU). So it can be a bug or they still have to improve the code to manage properly IPS engine.

Unfortunately Snort 3.0 is still in Alpha test (multi-thread support). XG has a better management of IPS (because it can be enabled only between vlan, network objects) while UTM does not handle IPS specifically but UTM runs on UTM120 with no issue even with other features enabled.

I know that UTM120 is not on the official HW eligible list but it is better than XG85.

https://community.sophos.com/kb/en-us/122869

I would like to try and see how XG runs on XG85 with IPS enabled.

Hi Jared,

Any HA deployment in the scenario? Such issue is seen with appliances deployed in HA there is a fix to this but that comes from support which needs a back-end tweak. We are improving on the IPS section in our upcoming release meanwhile, if appliances are in HA, can you rebuild HA and let us know if that fixes the issue.

Thanks

Hi Sachingurung, 

I cant speak for Jared, but my home config is definitely not configured for HA. 

I assume best course for us will be to wait for the next release again and see if the issue is resolved, as I know I have for the last 2 releases. 

Thank you,

Darrian

Sachingurung,

No, just a simple stand-alone home firewall, freshly installed last week with little config on it, except what was needed to get to the internet.  I re-installed the firewall thinking that the upgrade between 15 and 16 messed something up.  However, upon booting up from the install, I still had the same problem.

Another release?  How often are updates released?

Thanks,

Jared

sachingurung, 

users here are saying that IPS was working fine on v15 and not well anymore on v16.

I think that you should check if under some circunstances, the IPS is consuming all the RAM resouces.

In my case IPS is working fine at home and on some customers (for example XG 210), but on some sytems here it is causing a problem.

You could contact users here and get logs to improve the code or compatibility with other system that are not XG appliances.

Thanks.

Hi All,

In such cases please DM me your instances, I am sure if that is common then a JIRA is present and being worked upon. IPS services are affected as to what I see over the forum and many of the issues related to IPS seems to be resolved in the next version. Awaiting its release.

Thanks

Hi All,

In such cases please DM me your instances, I am sure if that is common then a JIRA is present and being worked upon. IPS services are affected as to what I see over the forum and many of the issues related to IPS seems to be resolved in the next version. Awaiting its release.

Thanks