NG Firewall takes a long time to save changes!

Overview

If your NG Firewall takes a very long time to commit changes after clicking the Save button, please read on!

Why this happens

NG Firewall's emails — Reports and alerts — can be sent from NG Firewall in a variety of ways: via cloud-hosted relay server; directly from NG Firewall itself; and via an SMTP server you have configured. In 2024, the relay server was decommissioned, so any NG Firewall which is set to send through that server is not able to send emails. This leads to an outgoing queue full of stuck or frozen emails. This congestion can cause long delays while NG Firewall is saving changes, as those emails are evaluated for sending based on any changes that might have been made in the UI. 

Note that this only affects emails sent directly by NG Firewall itself. It has no bearing on emails sent through NG Firewall from downstream clients.

What you can do about it

#1: Change your outgoing email server setting

Go to Config > Email > Outgoing Server and change the setting to "send email directly". If you have an SMTP server available, you can also select "send using specified SMTP server" option.

Changing this setting should occur very quickly, rather than the long delays you may have experienced. After changing it, those long delays should be resolved.

#2: Clear frozen email messages

This option should only be undertaken if the first step does not resolve the problem.

1. Access the NG Firewall command-line interface: Accessing the command line in NG Firewall
2. Run this command: exim -bp | exiqgrep -i | xargs exim -Mrm
3. Close the CLI window.

This should resolve any lingering delays in saving changes.