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MAC - Disabling Web Protection options remotely ?

JpSaMac

Hi,

It's been a few weeks that my Mac clients (running SAV 9) report very bad network performances when it comes to load intranet or Internet websites (no issue on file transfer or other protocols). This did not occur at the same time on all clients, there has been no major software update running on those, so it was difficult to understand what triggered the issue.

As I looked on other clients which were not yet impacted, I found out that a few Mac escaped the SAV 9 upgrade and were still running SAV 8.    I looked at both software preferences, noticed that the "Web Protection" options are new in SAV 9 and disabled both options there. That way I managed to regain normal intranet and internet browsing.

I'm not yet sure what really happened (the Macs are located in a huge entreprise environment, I heard about changes on proxies and firewalls up the chain, but I'm mostly in the dark if the big IT changes things and my Mac environment is very small) so I first would like to make sure those options are disabled on all installs.

I couldn't find a way to achieve that with the "sweep" command-line utility, and I didn't find a .plist preferences file to modify and a process to relaunch to automate this.

Would you have an idea to disable those options on all remote clients through Apple Remote Desktop ?

Best regards,
Jean-Philippe

:51862


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  • 0

    Hello Jean-Philippe,

    are these Macs "managed", i.e. part of a central installation, or did you install the stand-alone package?

    Christian

    :51866
  • 0

    Hello Christian,

    I used to rely on SUM but it has been discontinued. As I don't have access to a Windows server for now, I used the standalone package, clients will update by connecting to Sophos directly.

    :51870
  • 0

    Hello,

    I would suggest you may be best considering Sophos Cloud to protect your Mac computers. You can get a free trial for 30 days here - https://secure2.sophos.com/en-us/products/cloud/free-trial.aspx.  This will give you centralised management without a Windows server.  Options like this can then be controlled centrally, although the ones you mention currently require Support to change them as they shouldn't really need to be changed and there is likely to be an underlying problem.

    Regards,

    Jak

    :51874
  • 0

    Hello Jak,

    I'm sorry but I expect to have some kind of resolution for a simple action (changing a setting from the command-line) as our businness recently committed for 3 years with your product.
    Which files are modified when the app settings are changed ?

    Best regards,
    Jean-Philippe

    :51922
  • 0

    There is no supported way on doing it - standalone is not designed for en mass configuration changes.  Cloud would be a neat solution if you have more than a handful of Mac but still consider it fairly small.  If you're bound into a contract for an on-premise contract you need to install Enterprise Console on one computer - even a Windows 7/8 client on a VMware Fusion/Parallel virtual machine.

    For background the settings are in the /Library/Preferences/com.sophos.sav.plist file at the bottom.  Example of file opened in Xcode:

    2014-08-01_10-29-59.png

    When Web Protection is on the file looks like this...

    <key>WebProtectionFilteringEnabled</key>
	<true/>
	<key>WebProtectionScanningEnabled</key>
	<true/>

    And when Web Protection is off it looks like this...

    <key>WebProtectionFilteringEnabled</key>
	<false/>
	<key>WebProtectionScanningEnabled</key>
	<false/>

    Before you decide to starting Googling 'edit plist Mac Terminal' consider that the file is locked as the settings are being used and doing anything other than opening the program and changing the settings from inside it is unsupported - sorry.  After a lot of hacking about you may get something to work (or not) but in any case the installation won't be supported.

    :52359
  • 0

    That's good to me, thanks !

    I'll add those lines to my maintenance script.

    Regards,

    Jean-Philippe

    :52415
  • 0

    I'm not sure what your 'maintenance script' does but please note the warning - altering that file via a script is not supported.

    It seems, from reading the first post, that we have skipped right over the issue of Web Protection causing poor web and intranet browsing performance and gone straight into the 'switch it off' answer.  I highly recommend you consider troubleshooting why the problem exists in the first place instead of working around in now - you're not best protected if you disable the Web Protection feature.

    Note: SAV for Mac 9.1 seems to have a lot of improvements over 9.0.x when it comes to web browsing performance.  Testing that on a couple of problematic Macs would be a way forward.

    :52417