Troubleshooting Tip: Web page blocked 'An error occurred while trying to rate the web site using the webfiltering service'

Description

This article describes how to allow users to access the internet when a rating error occurs.

Indeed, an error may occur whilst trying to rate a particular website, which results in the user seeing a 'Web Page Blocked' message when accessing the internet or a particular webpage which is a part of the blocked website or a restricted website in a Web-Filter profile.

This may be caused by:

• An issue while rating the website using the FortiGuard Web Filtering feature.
• The expiration of the Web Filtering license.
• FortiGate being unable to connect to the FortiGuard servers.

Scope

Web filtering.

Solution

To allow users to access the internet, is presented here for FortiOS v5.2 and v5.4.

This will allow users to access the websites when a rating error occurs and will allow the FortiGate unit to use the FortiGuard Web Filtering database that it has stored on the unit to rate the website.

This is applicable even if the FortiGuard Web Filtering license has expired, but it will not allow access to the latest update from the FortiGuard service.

Note: In recent firmware versions, the option will look like the following:

In FortiOS v6.4 and later, 'fortiguard-anycast' can be disabled, and the protocol and port can be set to UDP and port 8888.

Change the FortiGuard settings as follows when a rating error occurs:

config system fortiguard

    set fortiguard-anycast disable

    set protocol udp

    set port 8888

end

The request is considered as a 'rating error' after a 15 second timeout (the default can be changed up to 30 seconds): 

config system fortiguard

     set webfilter-timeout <1> to <30>

end

Related article:

Troubleshooting Tip: Unable to connect to FortiGuard servers