MAC - Disabling Web Protection options remotely ?

Question

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

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ruckus · Accepted Answer

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:

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.