Protecting computers, stuck on hourglass with no progress

Question

When in the console, and I attempt to protect computers, the hourglass appears but it never changes to the down arrow. It stays with the hourglass for perhaps a day before erroring out. Any ideas as to why this happening, or where can I look to troubleshoot?

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LouiseVan Alstyne · Accepted Answer

Thank you, but I had gone through the troubleshooting steps before posting. It was all endpoints that this would occur on, although previously this was working. In addition, clients installed manually were not showing as managed in the console. 
 
It is now working again, I believe the culprit was that the "Sophos Certification Manager" service was not running on the server - apparently upon a reboot this service did not come back up. Things started working again once this service was started. 
 
For prosperity, the server version is 5.3

ruckus · Answer

The orange arrow is the first step of the deployment process. Article community.sophos.com/.../119399 explains it's when the management server (actually the Sophos management service) is going off to the computer and trying to create a remote scheduled task. 
 Generally this is because the computer blocks the connection (perhaps the firewall on the client computer denies access). As QC says, the deploy guide he linked to has troubleshooting steps. If you think you have followed all the required steps, get one computer nearby that you can test with, disable the firewall locally, and redeploy the software to it from the console. If that works then the central GPO etc. you created hasn't been actioned by the computer. 
 It may be worth watch this video from the point of deployment (about 6 minutes in)...