Symantec Web Gateway (SWG) - Best Practices: software updates

Products

• Web Gateway

Issue/Introduction

Before you run a software update, Symantec recommends that you prepare your system. 

Resolution

The table below describes the steps to prepare and run a software update.

 

 Before upgrading the software version, make sure to upgrade the Database version to the newest (use the "release date" to verify).

System restarts	Symantec Web Gateway automatically reboots after the upgrade finishes.
Perform upgrades during off-peak hours	Perform upgrades during off-peak hours since the Symantec Web Gateway service temporarily shuts down during the upgrade.
Do not restart	The software update process may take several minutes to complete. If you restart before the process is complete, data corruption is likely. If data corruption occurs, you must reinstall the appliance with a factory image.
Close and restart existing browser sessions	After you perform a software upgrade but before you make any configurations, close down all browser sessions. Otherwise, new features may not appear in the Web GUI in an existing browser session after the upgrade completes.
Purge events from the Symantec Web Gateway database	Symantec Web Gateway reports events for all of the traffic that it monitors and stores these events in a SQL database. Over time, millions of events can accumulate. You can see the number of events in the Web GUI on the Reports > Custom Reports page. Change the default date filter to All dates. The time that it takes to migrate to the new version increases significantly when you have over 100 million events in the database. Therefore, purge the Symantec Web Gateway database before you begin your migration so that there are less than 100 million events. You can export these items to your own database for long-term storage or delete them. For more information, see the Symantec Web Gateway Implementation Guide.