Protection Engine servers are communicating with telemetry.broadcom.com

Products

• Protection Engine for Cloud Services
• Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

You have Symantec Protection Engine (SPE) servers that are communicating to telemetry.broadcom.com.  You request to what the purpose of this communication is and, if possible, stop the communication.

Environment

Symantec Protection Engine for Cloud services 9.x

Linux

Cause

The purpose of this communication is to send telemetry data ( product usage and system configuration data ) to Broadcom.

If your license type is a Portfolio License Agreement (PLA), you will need to send us this information.

If your license type is a Standard License, you do not need to send this information. Also, if firewalls or other barriers prevent SPE servers on your company network from sending telemetry data to Broadcom, there is no problem with SPE's operation.

 

Resolution

SPE will send Telemetry data when installing and on the first day of each month.

How to stop sending Telemetry data when installing SPE

Set the environment variable DISABLE_SSE_TELEMETRY=1 before starting the SPE installation.

Procedures Example)

1. set environment variables.
   
   export DISABLE_SSE_TELEMETRY=1
   
   
2. Verify that the settings are reflected.
   
   echo $DISABLE_SSE_TELEMETRY
   
   
3. Install SPE.
   
   Symantec_Protection_Engine/Symantec_Protection_Engine/RedHat_8_6/SymantecProtectionEngine.sh
   
   (In this example, it is RedHat_8_6, but it depends on the installer you are using.)
   
   After starting the installation with the above command, follow the menu displayed to proceed with the installation.
   
   
4. After installing SPE, in the file TelemetryPingData, you should see a line that says "Telemetry Silent Ping Status = -9".
    
     cat /opt/Symantec/SSETelemetryData/TelemetryPingData

 

How to stop sending Telemetry data on the first day of each month

1. Stop the SPE service.
   
   /etc/init.d/symcscan stop
   
   
2. Create a file called category3.xml. The default path is /opt/SYMCScan/bin/category3.xml. Paste the following 7 lines into category3.xml.
   
   --- Start ---
    
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!--Sample XML file generated by XMLSpy v2005 U (http://www.xmlspy.com)-->
   <custom xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" version="090000" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="category3.xsd">
    <configuration> 
    <RuntimeTelemetryInterval value="0"/>
    </configuration>
   </custom>
    
   --- End ---
   
   Supplemental note: The "version="090000" part is adapted to SPE 9.0.0.
   
   
3. Start the SPE service.
   
   /etc/init.d/symcscan start

 

To stop sending telemetry data, follow the above steps.