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Overview
This article describes how to resolve an issue wherein the Sophos Connect GUI display "Service unavailable".
What to do
The following screenshot shows that Sophos Connect GUI displays "Service unavailable".
Cause of this issue: When a tunnel disconnect is initiated, the strongSwan IPsec daemon gets stuck in an infinite loop. This will result in the GUI not getting a response for disconnect and ultimately timeout and show the error as "Service unavailable".
Workaround for Mac: Refer to the Sophos Connect Application online help.
Workaround for Windows: Refer to the steps mentioned below:
Related information
The GES wrote me first the following email tomorrow:
"the update is expected to be released on March 3rd. We are currently working on a hotfix installer version."
This did not work for me unfortunately. The service is stuck in a loop, trying to start, failing, and then trying to start again.
We had the exact same problem. For some users the client was working perfectly, for others, the same service start loop, crashing and restarting about every 20 seconds. Simple reinstall did not help either, but uninstalling, deleting the whole C:\Program Files (x86)\Sophos\Connect directory manually, and then installing solved the issue for us.
Sometimes, its good to uninstall the software. Reboot, and install it. Do not use uninstall and apply immediately the same MSI.
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For us, deleting the install directory was a crucial step. It did not work otherwise.
We had that to with some users, uninstalling did not work, went to the program directory and found old config files from older/other vpn client, just removing them solved it.
Bart van der Horst
Sophos XG v18(.5) / v19 Certified Architecthttps://www.bpaz.nl