I have been running ASG v6 for the longest time, around 5 years now, as my home firewall. But last week I decided to upgrade to v 7.5, as I came in possession of an HP EVO machine with 2.6 GHz P4 CPU, 1 GB RAM and a 40 GB hard drive, that I could install it on. My old Compaq Deskpro with the P3 CPU, that I had been running ASG v6.x on, had a motherboard that maxed out at 512 MB RAM, so that box had to be replaced.
I proceeded with caution. The HP EVO box worked fine as a Windows machine, so I knew the hardware worked, but I did a test install of ASG v7.504 and played with the new webadmin for a day, before I put it into service. I ended up just importing my license, and recreating the configuration from scratch, since I was a bit slow in finding where I could import the v6.315 backup.
As a test machine, with just its Internal interface connected to my LAN, the HP EVO with ASG 7.5 on it worked fine. But once I put it into service as a firewall, both the web proxy and the webadmin interface started freezing up on it. At first, I thought it was a RAM issue, so I swapped out the PC3200 DIMMs in it. That didn't fix it. Then I noticed all the "200012 LAND Attack, sameip detected Protocol Anomaly" errors I was getting, all caused by my primary workstation. I googled it, and found this forum thread:
https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/54/t/39227
Sure enough, I was running my Vuze bit torrent client on the workstation, with proper port forwarding set up through the ASG 7.5 firewall. I seed bit torrent steady at 20 KBytes/sec, and am also currently downloading several DVD sized torrents. I therefore followed the advice in the thread, and disabled firewall rule #200012.
But the web proxy and webadmin interface on my ASG 7.5 box is still freezing up intermittently. When they do, other services such as the DNS proxy and the SMTP proxy are suffering as well. But data streaming, such as the bi-directional bit torrent traffic, and any YouTube video playbacks in progress, are not affected. The freeze-ups of the web services clear themselves after a few minutes, but then, after working properly for a few minutes, they freeze up again. This meant that web access in the house became a 3 minutes on and 3 minutes off affair, which was not acceptable to either me or the other members of the household. Between us, we moderate several web forums, and reliable Internet access is a must for us.
I had to give up on this issue for now. I did not succeed in debugging this unexpected problem with running v7.5 on my HP EVO hardware. I therefore ended up putting my old Deskpro machine with v6.315 on it back into service for now.
I really like the look and feel of v7.5, but I got stuck, not knowing enough to fix this freeze-up of the web services.
Does anyone here have any insight into this problem?
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