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Trend OfficeScan deployment in Isolated Environment

I don’t know how this happens but for some reason I end up spending quite a bit of my time trying to get Trend solutions to work. And most of the time it’s in a scenario that hasn’t been covered in the knowledge base articles. I’ve recently been working on a project to create a virtualized test and development environment on Flexpod which involved placing a copy of production behind a firewall. This involves similar IPs and server names but also a problem is that the OfficeScan server requires two vNICs which isn’t really a solution that Trend advise. This problem delayed the project by almost two weeks as I tried numerous fixes and then waited on assistance from support that wasn’t up to scratch to finally getting a Trend employee that really knew his stuff to provide assistance. The configuration I required wasn’t something he had seen in the past but it was definitely something he’d like to see working so we spent a few days trying out different methods to get things working and the steps below is how it was finally fixed.

Requirements:

To install OfficeScan Server on a VM in a DMZ with two vNICs, one with external access to the corporate network and one with internal access via static routes to servers within the DMZ or cell. Only two VMs have ‘egress’ connections to the corporate network and run through an ASA firewall. All other VMs are hidden within the cell in their own domain, do not have internet access and exist across multiple vLANS and also each server VM has multiple vNICs.

Due to the VMs in the cell being a test and development environment for production-based scada systems it has to sit behind a firewall as the scada teams requested that the test and dev environment have the same IP addresses and machine names as their prod environment. Yes, I know that’s crazy and I have brought it up numerous times that this should not be done but I’ve been over-ruled so I’ve just had to deal with it.

Issue:

This is not a recommended configuration from Trend for OfficeScan, they recommend another product for this type of DMZ based protection. We required the OfficeScan server to be able to communicate on two different vNICS, vLANs and IP address on the same ports. This is also not something that Trend has documentation on. In our environment we run a centralised Control Manager that manages the licenses for different OfficeScan servers deployed within the environment. In most instances the different OfficeScan servers sit in different domains. The Control Manager server can only see the newly deployed OfficeScan server on its egress connection, in this case we can say 172.54.21.21. However, all VMs within the cell can only see the OfficeScan server on the internal facing address 172.90.60.99. Trend does have an IPTemplates fix on their knowledge base to allow for multiple vNICs on a client but this doesn’t working in the server side. The issue we faced is that when agents were installed on clients they were being denied on the firewall from reaching the egress connection of 172.54.21.21, and rightly so. Traffic allowed in to the vNIC from the Control Manager server is on port 8080 and the internal client VMs need to communicate with the OfficeScan server on ports <whatever5digitportnum> i.e 19099, and 8080, so allowing internal VMs to hit that egress connection would create a major security risk.

The required fix involved modifying the OfficeScan files so that it could communicate with the Control Manager server for updates and licensing but also allow the client VMs in the cell to communicate on the internal facing IP address/FQDN.

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