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My thoughts after using the XG for some months.

Troels Hansen

As a long-time UTM user, trying once again to convince myself to give the XG a go, these are my experiences.

I absolutely love the UTM, the simplicity, well designed UI and how easy it is to use.

However on the XG....

The WebUI still seems like something straight out of 1995, optimized for 1024*768 resolution.

Not consistent naming of for example interfaces. Some places you can use the self defined name, some places not.

Not always being able to rename created objects.

Text being truncated, making it extremely hard to get an overview.

The zone based firewall and NAT linking is a f****g joke. Seems more and more like they just expect people to always do "ANY-ANY" rules.

Documentation is mis-leading and often just specifies "just add ANY", doesn't describe the actual usecase, and often exremely bad written. Some of it almost seems auto-translated, or written by Indian support?

When you write to support you quite fast get a response from their Indian support team which points to a generic KB or support page, even though you clearly stated that you already tried that solution, then doesn't hear anything back for days.

Video how-to guides, where 95% of the time is spent on useless sales pitches.

I often find myself not being able to delete objects because it claims its still in use not really being able to find out where.

It seems Sophos is actively trying to force customers from UTM to XG by keeping them in the dark, removing functionality, not updating functionality to new standards.

I'm quite sure XG can be a dream in a all Windows / AD, using all of Sophos's products and end user protection.

Right now I'm stuck with 2 XG firewall's I recommended to a client, really wishing I had stuck with UTM.

Sophos have had so long to fine tune the product, but it seems they are more focused on adding features to support their software, that delivering a good product.

Am I really just not understanding the product?

and yes, have actually had courses in both the UTM and XG, and are/were a certified XG and UTM architect.



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    Most of those parts are actively worked on. 

    But some of those points seems to be not true in a extend to the market. While some features were not integrated, other got added to interact with the market. Not everything was moved over from UTM to SFOS. 

    Most of your points are regarding the Web Interface and are correct (Resolution etc.).

    But the firewall based system is actually pretty good, if you are into zone based firewalls in general. I can work with a zone based firewall without the need of remembering the IP networks at all. Most of the customers in bigger setups can degree the need of rules and the complexity of rules by a big portion simply by using zones for filter criteria. That needs to use a segmentation concept of course. If you use LAN for everything and no VLANs, then the zone concept is actually redundant. But to actually have user friendly rules, easy to understand, is a big win. Example VLAN for printers. You can say, My internal segment has access to the printer VLAN in one go, select the services, you want. Done. In case of UTM, you would have to maintain your objects of the networks and work with network/interface groups etc. Which blows up bigger setups. 

    Linked NAT is generally speaking a migration helper. Simply use the default NAT (aka MASQ from UTM) and NAT for DNAT etc. 

    The object handling will get better in the next major release, as far as i know. 

    If you find the documentation bad or not understandable, you could create a short Thread in the community and the docs team will pick up the request to change that. Personally i find most of the information i need in the docs quite fast. 

    Which features or things do you miss about the SFOS platform and you felt are "being removed" or not updated to the standards? 

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  • 0

    Most of those parts are actively worked on. 

    But some of those points seems to be not true in a extend to the market. While some features were not integrated, other got added to interact with the market. Not everything was moved over from UTM to SFOS. 

    Most of your points are regarding the Web Interface and are correct (Resolution etc.).

    But the firewall based system is actually pretty good, if you are into zone based firewalls in general. I can work with a zone based firewall without the need of remembering the IP networks at all. Most of the customers in bigger setups can degree the need of rules and the complexity of rules by a big portion simply by using zones for filter criteria. That needs to use a segmentation concept of course. If you use LAN for everything and no VLANs, then the zone concept is actually redundant. But to actually have user friendly rules, easy to understand, is a big win. Example VLAN for printers. You can say, My internal segment has access to the printer VLAN in one go, select the services, you want. Done. In case of UTM, you would have to maintain your objects of the networks and work with network/interface groups etc. Which blows up bigger setups. 

    Linked NAT is generally speaking a migration helper. Simply use the default NAT (aka MASQ from UTM) and NAT for DNAT etc. 

    The object handling will get better in the next major release, as far as i know. 

    If you find the documentation bad or not understandable, you could create a short Thread in the community and the docs team will pick up the request to change that. Personally i find most of the information i need in the docs quite fast. 

    Which features or things do you miss about the SFOS platform and you felt are "being removed" or not updated to the standards? 

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