Adobe Update Problems and Akamai Technologies

[Jeff Zylstra]

Having a dickens of a time (in honor of our nearly, dearly departed Andrew ) getting updates to work for Adobe Flashplayer.  They are being blocked by the gateway anti-virus on my SonicWall TZ-210 Router.   


The problem is that Akamai Technologies domain who hosts the update servers for Adobe, must have hundreds of servers with different IP addresses, and the Sonicwall only allows ranges of IP addresses to be used as exceptions, and not domain names.   I've put huge ranges of IP addresses in, but every stinking time I have an update, it seems that it is blocked because the download server uses a different IP address.   

There is no place in the SonicWall to do this by domain name that I can find.  Does anyone know how to solve this issue once and for all?  And don't say "Cisco" either, Mark!     Thanks in advance.

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

does the SonicWall allow networks in lieu of hosts

eg. 123.123.123.0/24

Might be easier to exclude Akamai's CDN that way.

[Mark]

Look into what Rick said, but my reaction is to followup your question with my own questions: what are you blocking and why?  Are you blocking all downloads unless there is an exception in the firewall?  Seems like a lot of work...

[Jeff Zylstra]

OK.  Gateway anti-virus blocks password protected zip files, MS Office files that contain macros, & packed executable files.  It inspects HTTP, FTP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, CIFS/NETBIOS and TCP streams for these kinds of files or traffic.  I do occasionally get notifications that password protected zip files have attempted to download under the guise of some other website or process.

I have not tried the /24 network switch on on the IP addresses so I will try that and report back.  Thank you, gentlemen.