Troubleshooting Firewalls

If you are using a firewall that blocks outgoing traffic, it can either REJECT or DROP network requests. If it is set to DROP then you might find that synchronizing with the SUSE Customer Center times out.

This occurs because the synchronization process needs to access third-party repositories that provide packages for non-SUSE clients, and not just the SUSE Customer Center. When the SUSE Manager Server attempts to reach these repositories to check that they are valid, the firewall drops the requests, and the synchronization continues to wait for the response until it times out.

If this occurs, the synchronization takes a long time before it fails, and your non-SUSE products are not shown in the product list.

You can fix this problem in several different ways.

The simplest method is to configure your firewall to allow access to the URLs required by non-SUSE repositories. This allows the synchronization process to reach the URLs and complete successfully.

If allowing external traffic is not possible, configure your firewall to REJECT requests from SUSE Manager instead of DROP. This rejects requests to third-party URLs, so that the synchronization fails early rather than times out, and the products are not shown in the list.

If you do not have configuration access to the firewall, you can consider setting up a separate firewall on the SUSE Manager Server instead.