If Netscope is placed in-line between your gateway/router and the rest of the network there will be short time interval where network traffic is interrupted (i.e flow is stopped) in the following scenarios:
- Manually entering or exiting bypass mode via the Configuration tab menu item.
- Entering bypass mode TCP flows have been seen to be interrupted up to 9 seconds but 1 to 4 seconds is usual.
- Exiting bypass mode 7 seconds interruption is usual. (see note 1 below)
- Rebooting Netscope. A reboot on an M4/M5 can take up to 3 minutes. However, Netscope automatically puts the two port fail-safe bypass network card into bypass mode to allow traffic through while the computer is rebooting. Netscope then exits bypass mode when the system is up and running again. Therefore network traffic is not interrupted for the whole duration of the reboot but only for the time intervals where the network card is entering into bypass mode and exiting from bypass mode. One should allow for up to 9 seconds followed by a 7-second interruption.
Therefore when rebooting Netscope or entering/exiting bypass mode these interruption times should be taken into account in planning when one is going to perform these actions. For example, one would not do this during a major executive video conference call.
Note 1 - One test gave 60 seconds and the ethernet device erroneously switched to a lower speed. This was a test with only 1 TCP flow. Tests with 9 tcp flows did not show this. A reboot fixed this anomaly.