How to restart services on Sophos Firewall
Even a Sophos Firewall is just an operating system on a piece of hardware. And like any other operating system, there are security vulnerabilities, updates or services that can hang, although this is very rarely the case with the Sophos Firewall.
In this article I explain how to restart a service on the firewall.
Web Admin GUI
Some services can be restarted by using the Web Admin GUI. It should be self-explanatory how this works.
However, not all firewall services can be restarted from the browser, so the console is still required in some cases.
Firewall Console (SSH)
To get full control, you can log on to the firewall’s Advanced Shell by SSH.
Secondly, you need a list of all services that are available on the firewall. For this purpose, use our overview Sophos Firewall troubleshooting: services and logs, which lists the most important services and log files.
However, you can also show all services with the following command on the Advanced Shell:
service -S
If it is unclear what the zebra service does exactly, Sophos Firewall troubleshooting: services and logs helps. There you can see that it is the static routing service.
Restart firewall service
If you want to restart this zebra service, you can do so with the following command:
service -ds nosync zebra:restart
If the service is to be stopped and restarted first, there are two individual commands for this as well.
service zebra:stop -dsnosync
service zebra:start -dsnosync
Firewall Service Status
We stay with the Zebra service and now we want to check what the status is, for example, to find out if it is running:
service zebra:status -dsnosync
Other examples of frequently used services
Here are some sample commands to restart some other services. If you do not have the Web Admin GUI running, you can restart it as follows: Restart Sophos Firewall Web Admin GUI
Restart Wireless Controller
service awed:stop -dsnosync
service awed:start -dsnosync
Restart SMTP Service
service -ds nosync smtpd:restart
Restart VPN IPsec Service
service -ds nosync strongswan:restart