Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (GASMO)

[prad-ucs]

Dear all, I was wondering if anyone can help...

 

I've just got myself a smoothwall box and it's been a complete nightmare from start to finish (well not quite finished yet) and it's taken weeks to get it working anywhere near as good as my previous router (ipcop) - however because of the new PREVENT legislation I had to move to it. Anyway, I'll get to the point - it's set up as a transparent proxy and linked to AD and therefore seamlessly picks up user details - however after a short period of inactivity it kicks you off and only re-authenticates you if you launch something that uses http, i.e. a browser. The Google App Sync for Microsoft Outlook background app doesn't do enough to re-authenticate you to smoothwall, so instead fails, and doesn't pick up email - annoyingly even if you then start browsing you have to manually kick start the sync to pick up / send mail through outlook - understandably this is frustrating my users. Google Support are unable to help because they are quite rightly blaming the router for kicking you off after a period of inactivity, however Smoothwall support haven't got a clue either...

 

I've just tried a workaround of kicking off a vbscripty to GET an image on a http url every 10 minutes, however that's not working - I reckon because somewhere along the lines the image that I'm GETing is being cached on the local machine or something...

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated....

[mrwoberts]

Interesting, thanks for the workaround idea.

Until someone can come up with the proper solution, does the vbscript work when requesting an image/htm file from https instead - I was hoping that they wouldn't be cached.

[pcstru]

Do you need these connections logged by user? If not, I'd look to exclude outgoing POP/IMAP originating from staff machines (based on IP address) from requiring any authentication.

[prad-ucs]

Ooh, didn't think of trying https - will give that I try tonight. Smoothwall support came back to be with a suggestion today but that didn't work!!!

 

Interesting, thanks for the workaround idea.

Until someone can come up with the proper solution, does the vbscript work when requesting an image/htm file from https instead - I was hoping that they wouldn't be cached.

[prad-ucs]

GASMO uses port 80 and 443 to communicate with google mail servers - and these are always open. I added the URLS that GASMO uses to a group and then added that to an authentication exceptions policy and that didn't work either!

 

Do you need these connections logged by user? If not, I'd look to exclude outgoing POP/IMAP originating from staff machines (based on IP address) from requiring any authentication.