I’m sure some of us got a hands on old Astaro or SG box and thinking hah I might be able to use it in home and move up to enterprise from current residential one. There is no better way to learn about any product hands on practice, specially thing not working on home and you have to get that going ASAP!.
So recently I came a across old decommissioned astaro box, good thing about sophos is there software interface pretty much exactly same and only change happened on HW, same as Cisco IOS. So this described instruction will work on almost all the astaro/Sophos boxes. You can read more about Sophos UTM home ver from https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-home-edition.aspx
Okey lets get down to business. First you need to go to above link and click on get started and it will ask you to sign up for Sophos. This important because sophos will send you license file to this address need to register the device. So please don’t setup none@none.com address as email. Once you do that you will get license file and instruction to download ISO image for UTM https://www.sophos.com/en-us/support/utm-downloads.aspx .
Once you download the ISO burn to a disk because install via this ISO will not work on sophos or astaro boxes. It will go through the install and will throw an error such as ” install.tar missing ”
If you really desperate for install via USB you can follow this link and try to get this working https://www.fastvue.co/sophos/blog/creating-your-own-sophos-utm-bootable-usb-installation-drive/ . But again I had lots of trouble, so I resort out to burning to a DVD and install via USB DVD drive. Pretty much click next next and get this going.
Once you done install it will show a message saying to mange go to https://192.168.0.1:4444. Basically this is default for all UTMs out of the box. Set your PC NIC to 192.168.0.10 or something and subnet to 24bit and connect to LAn port of the UTM box and open browser and setup UTM. It is very easy process and nothing complex.
When you setting up utm it is very important to go through the process and use 30 free license when option when its prompt, because you will not be able to add home license to SG or Astaro box. So go though process and setup the way you want it in the home network as any firewall/router. As you all know there are some advance nice features with this Sophos UTM which none of the home FW comes with.
So once you done with all log into UTM from web page ( I assume you kept the default 192.168.0.1 as LAN gateway IP which I usually don’t 🙂 ). Once you log in and go to management—->System Settings and Shell Access and setup password, because we going to need this for shell access via putty.
Once you done that download any ssh client( I use putty ) https://www.putty.org/ . once you SSH into the system then login as Loginuser and type su and then ” rm /etc/ASG “( there is space between rm /etc/ASG). After that type reboot and you will be able to log back onto UTM web and install home license. Also you may have to cd into /etc and rm asg which I seen few times. https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/f/hardware-installation-up2date-licensing/10987/home-license-on-sg115
There are so many features comes with sophos utm home that many of home user never would think of but again who know. Anyways good luck with UTM home!!!
NetSideTech 