Adding Sophos Antivirus to Your Filter's Exception List to Prevent a Slow Browsing Experience

If your users are reporting a slow connection and have the Sophos antivirus on their device, you can add Sophos to an exception in your Smoothwall Filter to ignore the antivirus traffic.

The reason that your users might be experiencing a slow connection when they have the Sophos antivirus on their device, is because if the web antimalware checker is turned on, it accesses its database online before it lets your users access a website.

NTLM authentication for the Smoothwall Filter is not supported by the Sophos applications. They can't contact their server and so connections to the requested site are slow. Your users might also see an authentication request that appears to be unrelated to the website that they are trying to access.

Procedure

1. Create a custom category, see out help topic, Creating custom categories.
2. Add the following domains to the custom category:
   • sophosxl.net
   • sophosxl.com
3. Add the custom category to the authentication exception list, see our help topic, Creating authentication exceptions.
4. Create a whitelist policy for the custom category, see our help topic, Creating web filter policies.