Turning on Firewall Emergency Bypass to troubleshoot problems
Your Sophos XG Firewall if installed by TechNosis will have a baseline configuration derived from the best practices of our managed services business. This baseline is derived from many years of experience balancing the needs for security and usability for a wide variety of customers and situation.
No configuration is perfect and you may have open additional ports to meet your business needs. You can contact support@technosis.biz and we will make those changes for you. However, sometime it's necessary to quickly bypass the firewall completely to get a piece of software working and then come back to the firewall later to make a more permanent fix. To facilitate that need, the TechNosis baseline configuration includes and Emergency by pass in it's design.
1. Login to your Sophos XG Webadmin console at: https://portal.yourdomain.com:4443 (use your enduser admin account, not the default "admin" user to ensure your change audit trail is meaningful)
2. From the main dashboard look to see if your system says "Sophos Firewall manager: us-xxxxxxxxxxx" if it does then TechNosis in manager your firewall as part of your services. When this is true we make regular backups of your configuration and you can skip step 3. If Firewall manager is missing or blank; then we are not managing your system and you should make a backup of your configuration before preceding.
3. To make a backup of you configuration follow this 6 click flow. Not that you will have to click on local a two different points in the process. (If you don't make a backup and you make a mistake it is highly possible that you will lock yourself out and half reset you firewall to factory default to repair it. This sort of error is a lot more common that it was on the Sophos SG system).
4. After the backup is done:
- Go to Protect > Firewall
- Open the Overrides/ByPass Group
- Click on the Ellipses popup menu.
- Click on/off to toggle to on.
- Click ok on the popup confirmation.
5. Test you program and see if it works. If it does not then contact support@technosis.biz for help.
6. After you emergency need is passed you should turn off the Bypass and program the firewall special ports to resolve you needs. Running with the Emergency bypass On for an extended period of time is not recommended as it turns your firewall into an open relay and is a high risk setup.