Bring your own devices, mobile apps through smoothwall

[TheHawk]

Hi All

I was wondering if anyone has managed to get a bring your own device setup running so that IOS and other mobile apps work when going through the smoothwall Apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook mobile etc do not work the ordinary web browser works fine but staff have been complaining that they mainly use whatsapp, so as mobile apps are becoming increasingly popular with staff we feel we need to get this sorted.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

Dale

[tom_newton]

I presume you are using a transparent proxy?

 

There's 2 possible issues:

1. Authentication.

In general, apps hate authentication, but browsers are OK. A good solution to this is to use the 802.1x authentication tie-in with smoothwall. This authenticates the device prior to any traffic being sent, so is much more useful for apps.

 

2. Transparent proxying

Smoothwall is an HTTP proxy. Some apps use non-HTTP protocols over the HTTP ports, or don't stick to the standards in some ways. Facebook moile's definitely not one of these, but I guess whatsapp may be. Would suggest making sure it's not auth that's the problem, and then we can look at individual apps. It's also worth turning on SNI exceptions in your transparent proxy authentication policy - this works around some badly behaved apps.