Sophos UTM 9 Captive Portal and Authentication Timeout

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,

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.

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.

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

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