SonicWall Next-Generation Firewall – Why is SonicWall Blocking a Website?
When a website or app fails to work, there are several reasons why. One of the most common is when a firewall is blocking traffic to a specific site or application, such as a social media service like YouTube.
Using a SonicWall Next-Generation Firewall can help to prevent this issue from occurring by offering advanced packet inspection, intrusion prevention and application control. These features are backed by an expert team of Ancero experts who are trained to configure, run and manage your firewall for maximum performance.
The first thing to look at is the logs, since it would be very unlikely that a firewall would block a website without any kind of an explicit message. This is because the firewall would always log the event if it was trying to block something, and the logs have the ability to show you exactly which rule is blocking a specific website or application, as well as when that happened.
Another place to start is with the Fastvue Reporter, which shows the activity of a particular website over time. This is useful for identifying time wasting sites that can be blocked.
You can also use this to identify the most popular social media sites that are being accessed frequently. Alternatively, you can also filter the activity report using a Department, User or Origin Domain filter to show you just the sites that are causing the biggest problems.
If you are not sure how to filter your reports, please contact us for assistance.
In addition, if you are looking to block all social media sites, we can help by configuring an application control policy on your firewall, which allows you to restrict access to social media applications for certain users. If you are interested in this, contact us for a quote.
The other option is to create an access rule on your firewall that will completely block all Internet traffic, both LAN and WAN. To do this, you will need to login to the SonicWall management interface and navigate to policies.
To create an access rule from WAN to LAN, you will need to create an Address Object or Address Group of IP addresses that you would like to block, then select LAN > WAN as the zone, and click the Add button.
After the rule is created, you can then log into your LAN and access the web from a host behind the SonicWall and test the site to see if it works. If it does, you can then verify that the access rule is blocking the web traffic by viewing the Fastvue Reporter for SonicWall Activity Report.
