Wordpress login page through Smoothwall

[dapaulio]

Good Afternoon

I have an annoying issue where are smoothwall is setup to block blogs under "core block rule" which blocks top level Wordpress.com (no problem) and then have an overriding webfiltering rule called "Wordpress Subsites - Approved" that allows subsites of subsite.wordpress.com through (no problem).

This all works fine

 

my problem is that when the user wants to login to their wordpress site subsite.wordpress.com/admin the site redirects to https://wordpress.com/log-in/en-gb?redirect_to=........................ which is blocked due to it being in the Top level domain.

 

I have tried applying a webfilter URL Pattern to both the custom allowed list and the Wordpress Subsites category, which when i do a category check it correctly displays both categories and blogs category...

wordpress\.com/log-in/en-gb\?redirect\_to\=.*

 

so you would think the logon page is unblocked... no its blocked under the category blogs still although having superceding rules permitting the logon page to be unblocked

 

Anyone have any words of wisdom or tips on how they have got around this issue

 

TIA

[ibpalle]

Categorisation is done for all categories content belong in - I would suggest that blocking the Blogs category is not the right solution, making sure HTTPS inspection is on for Blogs is. Blogs are not specific content - it's generic content. It could be anything and blog sites can be useful in many cases. By using HTTPS inspection you can block blogs that deal with inappropriate content like terrorism, porn etc while still letting normal content through.

 

For the specific issue it sounds like it's a sequencing issue in the policies - make sure the allow is setup before the block and also be aware that there may be subdomains that feed content to the site also, which could be blocked.

 

That whack-a-mole process that is needed if you are blocking a content category like Blogs will be avoided if you no not block Blogs but just subject it to HTTPS inspection instead.