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Newbie question: - Whitelisting\blacklisting sites

Hello,

I'm just trying to get my head around how whitelisting & blacklisting sites work on the Sophos UTM.


We have the "ordering" category set as warn and i've added Amazon.co.uk & to the whitelist. However when users attempt to browse Amazon we're seeing that images aren't being displayed and the page isn't being rendered correctly, for instance the font is showing as times new Roman. I've done a bit of poking around in the Amazon html and can see some images are being pulled from "ecx.images-amazon.com" so I added this url to the whitelist as well.This hasn't fixed the problem.


What i've noticed is that if I paste the url of an image directly into the browser I get the Sophos warning message as it's part of the ordering category, why would I see this if it's been whitelisted? If I click continue on the warning I can then see the Amazon image. If I then go back and try and view the Amazon page again the page gets rendered correctly and all the images appear, but only for the single computer I do this on. For everyone else its still the same.

Another test I attempted was to whitelist a gambling site. We have the gambling category blocked so as a test I attempted to whitelist "888.com" to ensure I understood the process. I added "888.com" to the whitelist but the page containing to be blocked. I tried "http://www.888.com" as well but it still gets blocked.

Can anyone assist with this?

Thanks



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Parents
  • Hi, S C, and welcome to the UTM Community!

    I don't like the whitelisting approach in general as it requires too much maintenance.  Recently, DouglasFraser shared his excellent Web Filtering Best Practise guide that you might find helpful.  The rest of that thread contains a discussion of black/whitelisting.

    To allow a specific URL or domain, you need to make an Exception.

    Cheers - Bob

     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA
Reply
  • Hi, S C, and welcome to the UTM Community!

    I don't like the whitelisting approach in general as it requires too much maintenance.  Recently, DouglasFraser shared his excellent Web Filtering Best Practise guide that you might find helpful.  The rest of that thread contains a discussion of black/whitelisting.

    To allow a specific URL or domain, you need to make an Exception.

    Cheers - Bob

     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA
Children
  • Thanks for the link Bob.


    >>To allow a specific URL or domain, you need to make an Exception.

    So to allow users to view a site that is blocked you are supposed to create an exception and not add it to the “Allow these websites” list found under web filtering?

     What I’ve done currently is to add “amazon.co.uk” to - Web Protection -> Web Filtering -> Policies -> Click policy -> Websites tab -> Add website to “Allow these websites”.

     This isn’t working due to issues I mention in my initial post, e.g. missing images, but if I’m doing it wrong and should be using exception that might explain it.

     How would I go about making an exception for Amazon instead? I can see an Exception tab under Web Protection->Filtering Options->Exceptions tab. Is this the place?

    Thanks

  • Yes, that's the place. However, I think you will learn faster and get a better result if you start by implementing Douglas' prescription and then modifying it to suit your needs.

    Cheers - Bob

     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA