Smoothwall Express 3.1 Web Interface Hanging
[This issue has been observed with Smoothwall Express 3.1, and can affect systems with update 11, 12 or 13 installed.]
The Smoothwall web interface may appear to hang after entering the admin username and password.
The authentication works normally, but the main web interface never loads.
Cause:
The problem is caused by the Smoothwall web interface attempting to download a team message file from the Smoothwall update server
when an authenticated login occurs, the local cached copy of the file is more than 6 hours old,
and downloads.smoothwall.org isn't responding.
The file /httpd/cgi-bin/index.cgi periodically runs:
/usr/bin/wget -O ${swroot}/main/.teammsg.conf
http://downloads.smoothwall.org/updates/3.1-notices/teammsg.conf
The download is performed synchronously, so if the remote server does not respond, the CGI script waits for wget to finish.
This prevents the web interface from completing the login request.
At the time of writing, the
downloads.smoothwall.org website was not responding
which is why this problem was occurring.
(The community.smoothwall.org
and smoothwall.org websites were also not consistently available.)
Workaround:
The simplest solution is to disable the team message download.
Make a backup of /httpd/cgi-bin/index.cgi, then edit the file and comment out the section
(approx 15 lines of code) beginning with:
# If the team MSG hasn't been fetched in six hours, fetch it and set LAST_FETCHED.
Once this section has been disabled, the web interface should operate normally.
There is no need to restart Apache after making the change.
An alternative is to add a timeout to the wget command, for example:
wget -T 10 ...
This prevents a failed download from blocking the web interface indefinitely.
Notes:
The team message is not required for normal operation of the Smoothwall firewall, so disabling this feature should have no effect on normal firewall operation.
As always, make a backup copy of any file before modifying it, so you can easily revert to the original version if required.
last updated 3 Sep 2026
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