Release of v17 MR-2?

I've done that several times if you look further back through the case. Support keeps asking me for the same thing. The tunnel goes down every few hours and I've gotten them in many times to look at it. I've sent them logs, the whole works. I can't keep wasting my time helping them debug their broken code. I've been trying applying the maintenance releases as they've come out and reporting back that they make things worse. I can't sit around all day wasting my time on this with support. I have a job to do that should not involve sitting waiting to see when the new appliance I just bought is going to fail.

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for that. Reviewed your case and as you've mentioned, understandably rolled back to MR-1 due to the instability issues. To escalate the case, it will be necessary to be on MR-3 so we can extract the debug information necessary to submit to our Escalation/Development team. 

We will update this thread for any progress on this issue.

Thanks for your patience.

Best,
Karlos

I can't reiterate Ryan's point here enough. Many of us have been working with firewalls and vpn concentrators for a long time. I can't remember the last time I was uncomfortable heading out of town because of such a device and whether it would require hands-on support.

Personally, after moving to MR3 and completely rebuilding my IKEv2 tunnel to Azure with a new IPSEC profile I've had good results. The pre-built Azure ipsec profile that came with one of these MR's doesn't work at all - doesn't even reflect the requirements M$ themselves have published.

I'm not touching mine until it seems stable enough to be ready to try redundant tunnels - at this point seems like it would just drag me into another week of pain.

That is simply not an option. The majority of our companies business depends on this one vpn tunnel being up and running. From what I'm told from our business team we lose roughly $1,000 every minute that it's down. Unfortunately the other end of the tunnel is managed by a company that we are partnered with, so we don't manage it and do not have any say on replacing it. They are running an ASA that does not support ikev2. They have that ASA scheduled for replacement but it's not for several more months. I cannot upgrade to MR3, break the tunnel, send our company into a financial tailspin, and likely lose my job. No thank you, I'll let another user with this issue take that bullet. I am not going to knowingly upgrade to a broken firmware version.

*edit*

The "fix" that sophos' engineers should be working on right now is a graceful downgrade path back to 16 that will leave your config intact. Get users off of this broken version until sophos has fixed it and thoroughly tested it.

Same issue here, and your comments resonate with me too.

I just wanted to add a few data points for the Sophos Engineers.

I've got two Sophos XG  135's that both connect via encrypted GRE tunnels back to the same cisco router at main data center. 

The one that the VPN  goes up and down more than a yo-yo is on a  PPPoE DSL link  that is in the middle of nowhere (4Mbps down  and perhaps 750 up) which shows slight packet loss from time to time (0%-3.0%)  VPN goes down  maybe 3-10 times a day. 80% of the time the connection will come back up, 20% some of the SA's remain down or all are down.    While I understand there is some packet loss, the cisco router(the replacement for the sophos on the remote end) still keeps the tunnel up and passes traffic.  Perhaps the Sophos is not that forgiving when it tries to recover compared to the cisco.

The other XG is at my house.   That is on a nice cable modem connection with Spectrum. I have 100Mbps down and 5Mbps(I think) up.  This connection perhaps drops its ip sec SA's maybe once or twice a week at most(some weeks not at all) and always come backs up without issue.  A lot better than the DSL connection. 

Cheers,

-Scott

Hi Scott,

Scott_D_L said:

The one that the VPN  goes up and down more than a yo-yo is on a  PPPoE DSL link  that is in the middle of nowhere (4Mbps down  and perhaps 750 up) which shows slight packet loss from time to time (0%-3.0%)  VPN goes down  maybe 3-10 times a day. 80% of the time the connection will come back up, 20% some of the SA's remain down or all are down.    While I understand there is some packet loss, the cisco router(the replacement for the sophos on the remote end) still keeps the tunnel up and passes traffic.  Perhaps the Sophos is not that forgiving when it tries to recover compared to the cisco.

can you please PM me more details about your Sophos XG which is sitting in the middle of nowhere. I am particularly interested in the IKE version you are using.

And indeed, its correct that it may be that Sophos is currently not that forgiving when it comes to bigger/longer packet loss situations. This will further improve with MR5 and later.

On the other hand it depends also on the configuration how hard Sophos XG will try to reestablish a connection. 'Keying tries' and dpdaction are the two main values to be adjusted correctly in the Policy.

I'll say for me this is not the case. Both ends have stable, high bandwidth fiber connections. I also have been monitoring the outside interface of the Cisco ASA on the other end of the tunnel using Solarwinds on the Sophos UTM side, and see no slowdown or packet loss when these drops are happening. I have my tunnel set to reinitiate, and the rekey setting is 0 which is supposed to give it unlimited retries.

Thanks everyone who have provided me their Case ID's. I have reviewed and forwarded these cases over to the relevant team. I continue to urge customers who are experiencing this issue and have not opened a ticket to please do so.

In the meantime, please review our KB Article on recommended IPsec configuration for v17: Sophos XG Firewall v17: Recommended configuration for IPsec profile

Best,
Karlos

Thanks Karlos, but I suspect that that link is not helpful to the majority of users having these issues. Many of us have no say in what device or configuration is used on the other end of the tunnel. In many cases I've seen, the device on the other end is simply unable to run IKEV2. Of course upgrading everything to IKEV2 is preferred, but this is the real world and sometimes we in the tech industry have to use less than ideal security settings in order to keep business running. IKEV1 is still a broadly used standard, and I am sure most everyone is working on moving away from it, but while they're making that move it is crazy to simply take it out completely. When you're getting ready to stop supporting a standard like that there needs to be a year notice at a minimum, post an End-of-Life, set an exact date when Sophos will no longer support IKEV1. Don't just kill the functionality and tell users after they've upgrade "Oops! I guess you'll have to switch now!"