Skype - Cannot add Contacts and Skype Home Page Unavailable

[kalyanram.piratla]

Greetings,

I have come across an issue which is confusing me and I am running out of options to find a solution:

PANOS version:  4.1.9

User-ID agent : 4.1.3-2

I had issues with ip-user mapping and group-mapping ever since I've upgraded to 4.1.9.  Any new users post upgrade to staff group weren't being picked up by the firewall or User-ID agent.  This issue has now been fixed as unchecking the LDAP proxy under User-ID sorted it out.  Now,

I have a few user based security rule set up for staff, students and boarders with any application, any service and URL Filtering profiles as per user category.  Pre upgarde Skype as an application was working absolutely fine.  No-where was a rule defined specifically for Skype.  Post Upgrade, after logging into Skype, the Home Page comes up as "Skype Home unavailable" (please see snapshot attached).  When I then navigate through to "Add a Contact", I first get a web page error and then another page with just a close button (please see snapshots attached).

Important point to mention here is that it seems to be intrinsically linked with the "ABC" OU - any users within this OU or its sub-OUs are currently unable to add Skype contacts. (It starts to allow adding contacts and the home page is visible after approximately 4-5mins when left idle and refreshed).  Any users outside of the "ABC" OU can use Skype freely.  This is for students, staff and domain admin accounts.  For example, if I move the user "pqr" account out of the "ABC\Staff\...." OU into the "DEF" OU or "Test-OU", they can add a contact in Skype and see the home page immediately after logon.  If the user "pqr" is moved back into the "ABC" OU, then on Logon to Skype, the error is back.

I have tried creating a test rule for a particular user and allowed application skype, skype-probe, unknown-tcp.  Then added in application Web-browsing for no success.  The logs do not reveal anything specific making it more difficult to troubleshoot.  All I can see is unknown-tcp, skype and skype-probe.

And one more issue post upgrade is that while browsing YouTube and any other streaming media websites, users are suddenly getting blocked after a random period of time.  This is something I am investigating now.

I am not sure what to do now.  Any help on this is very much appreciated.

Please Note:  All this was absolutely fine during version 4.1.7 and there were no issues.  Downgrading now is really not an option as there are no maintenance windows available.

Many Thanks

Kalyan

[kalyanram.piratla]

Any idea or thoughts on this guys?