Sonicwall Firewalls and Internet Explorer 7 – Part 2

Was having a poke around our Sonicwall management pages today and noticed a new version of firmware!

Finally!

Version 3.1.3.0s fixes the issues with pop-ups and Internet Explorer 7 i mentioned in my previous post on this

They appeared to have fixed it on all the major models.

I’ve uploaded the new firmware on our firewall (a PRO 2040) and it seems to be working without any user agent string changes

It’s worth reading through the release notes as it claims there are still some issues but i’ll post about these if/when i find them

Internet Explorer Shortcuts

Steve Clayton mentions his favourite IE shortcut where you can add “www” and “.com” onto the end of a word

 e.g hotmail ctrl + enter becomes www.hotmail.com

This is a shortcut i also use lots during the day and is such a time saver

Just added onto this you can specify your own shortcut.

When i press ctrl+shift+ enter i get “www” and “.co.uk” added on

To change the suffix goto

TOOLS, INTERNET OPTIONS, LANGUAGES

At the bottom of the dialog you can specify your suffix here

BINGO!

For more information about IE shortcuts you can go to the IE Quick Reference page where there are lots of useful keyboard shortcuts

You can even download the page as a pdf to print out!

Sonicwall Firewalls and Internet Explorer 7

In my post about the full release of Internet Explorer 7i said that i was only using it on the laptop as i was worried about not being able to use it with the Sonicwall firewalls we use.

I decided to do a little bit more investigation into this a felt like i’ve been missing out!

A quick look on the microsoft IE newsgroup indicates that the firewall runs a script called BrowserCheck.js when it opens the pop-up window.

Basically this means that the firewall is expecting Internet Explorer 6 so just does nothing when it encounters version 7.

This gives me two options

1) Wait for Sonicwall to upgrade the firmware to support IE7

2) Make the sonicwall think i’m using IE6

I’m going to take the second option i think

Microsoft provide the “User Agent String Utility” on their download site for this

When you run the utility it gives you the option to report the site to Microsoft so “they can help improve” Internet Explorer. I didn’t see the point in doing this as Microsoft wouldn’t be able to browse to the firewall interface. Next you get a new Internet Explorer window with some text added at the end of the title to let you know it’s in compatibility mode. Any tabs you create in this instance will report itself as Internet Explorer 6

It all worked fine even if i did fine the solution a little clunky

Also found some registry files on the Fiddlertool site that changes the user agent string as needed. These changes are more permanent but it’s a preference thing in the end.

So this means i’ll be upgrading my main pc to the latest version!

** Updated on 19/03/2007 **

This has been fixed!

Read my new post here

IE 7, First thoughts

I’ve been waiting for the full release of Internet Explorer for some time.  I had a preview when i installed the Vista beta (RC2) but i didn’t install the IE beta onto any of my XP machines as i dont install beta software on “production” kit.

Now i fully understand why people prefer to use other browsers (Firefox, Opera, etc) but since ALL of the users i support use Internet Explorer i always ensure we’re using the same software as our clients where possible.

So when the download was made available last week i decided to install it onto my laptop first (just in case).  I like the new tabbed interface and was especially pleased that the print features have been overhauled. The improved full screen mode was also a welcome change as the toolbar auto-hides so you can see as much of the page as your screen will let you. I haven’t managed to look at the RSS integration properly yet as i’m still using RSS Bandit but i did notice the orange icon light up as i browsed my favourite blogs. I even managed to test the anti-phising filter using some spam i received and this seems like a nice touch that will help my end-users.

The only downside for me at the moment is that when using the management pages of the Sonicwall firewall’s we use, any pop-up windows just appear as blank pages. No buttons or text. Nothing!

I tried moving the address into the different zones to see if there was a security settings prevent the code on the page from running but this didn’t make any difference. A post on the Sonicwall support forum seems to suggest that the next firmware update will fix this. For this reason i wont be updating my main PC just yet and i’m glad that i took the step of upgrading on the laptop first!