SBH_Admin

Okay, everything seems to have worked. I simply exchanged the deny all firewall rule with a webfilter that only allows traffic to the wildcard fqdn *.vectorworks.net. This thread can be closed!

Of course! Attached here is another Vectorworks process during startup. It finished starting up around the 08:53 timestamp. The Firewall policy I have set up is pretty simple: Block any outgoing and incoming connections from the PC's in the room through our gateway. This seems promising, thank you. I will try this out an we will see if it makes any difference!

Okay, before I start here is some background to the problem: I'm an IT Admin at a school that, in part, teaches its students to use vectorworks designer 2018 for woodworking. We have an extra computer room which is used only for teaching the studens vectorworks designer. Once or twice a semester, the students have an exam to check their learning status. For this examination, I have to block all internet access for the computers in this computer room. I do this by blocking internet-access through our firewall to the static IP's of the machines in the room completely. I cannot just turn off the switch in this computer room, because the students need access to some samba shares in our internal network during their examination. The problem I have now, is that once I have blocked the internet access to these machines, vectorworks suddenly becomes way slower than before. It seems like vectorworks does not realize that it does not have access to the internet and tries to use cloud computing hardware to work faster, is unable to reach this cloud computing hardware, and thus tries to connect to for a certain amount of times, before failing. This entire process repeats fairly often and slows down the experience of using vectorworks significantly, which causes problems for the students trying to finish their examinations on time. The interesting thing is, that once I deactivate the firewall policy that blocks internet access, vectorworks suddenly works fine again. Also, if I completely disconnect the machines running vectorworks from the network, it also runs fine. I could unblock certain URL's or ports in our firewall, but I do not know which one. Does anyone of you have any idea how to resolve this issue? I have attached a screenshot of procmon, where vectorworks tries to connect to certain amazon cloud computing URLs. This machine had internet access while running vectorworks.