Update Failure

[Mike]

Well, I don't see much in the way of bug reporting so away
I go!!

When updating MS Beta definitions I was doing some testing.
We are just begining to utilize a proxy server and I
wanted to be certain of where the updates were coming from
to ensure that they would not be blocked. After a bit of
digging I found that the updates come from spynet.com.

What I also found, is that if spynet.com is blocked BUT you
have a working connection to the internet, you'll have the
MS Beta client report that your definitions are up to date
(at the time of me running this I was on definition 5687,
after I unblocked spynet.com it immediately saw and
downloaded update 5701).

 

[Bill Sanderson]

This is the place to talk about these issues.

How common is it to have a proxy set to block all but a specific set of
sites? This isn't something I've run into, but I've seen a couple or three
posts here about this arrangement.

What specfics need to be in the Help for the program besides what is there
now about firewall ports and configuration information?

 

[Max]

Very common. Many Schools are now working off whitelists on
their proxy/firewall/gateway.

Some businesses use the internet only for virtual WANs

We don't allow traffic on port 80 so that our filtering
can't be subverted and this program cannot handle this
because there is not proxy setting

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Thanks--that's a helpful response, and it makes sense to me--I can see why
this would be a useful way to configure.

I suspect that the team in charge of developing this product further knows
far more about such settings than I do, and I believe they will be aware of
this issue.

If I don't see a change in this--either documentation or the available
settings (authentication, for example) in beta2, I'll squawk about it.

It could be argued that a consideration might be that the product we are
testing is aimed at home users, and not suited for environments where this
configuration might be needed.
(but I won't make that argument--I'll leave that to the folks making the
decisions at Microsoft!)