Life and Kraya by Stephen Ramsay
Posts tagged Clients
Adobe update – excessive traffic to ardownload.adobe.com
Dec 16th
Adobe has not been without its problems of late, and whilst there have been security issues that could have lead to losses, so far none of our clients have suffered financially from Adobe’s failings. Until now that is.
One of our Clients had their ADSL cut off this week as they had exceeded the usage policy. Why? Adobe Update Manager on one Windows XP PC had decided to download over 70GB of data over the course of a 7 day period. It would appear that it was getting itself in a loop and just kept trying to update continuously, 70GB worth of continuously.
The Adobe website serves the update MSI binary files as content type Text/Plain, the Adobe Update client has a very short timeout and immediately opens another connection to re-start the download. Hence if there is a slow connection or the caching server does not return the whole file in a timely manner the Adobe Update client enters the infinite loop of retries, causing the excessive bandwidth consumption witnessed here.
There are several forum threads including on Adobe’s own site http://forums.adobe.com/thread/392129 all linking this issue to a conflict between and old version of WebMarshall and Adobe updater; however our machines do not use WebMarshall and we do not have it installed anywhere on our networks.
We do however use Squid caching on our CentOS 5 servers. The server in this instance seems to be fulfilling the requests on each occasion in a timely manner – the issue is that each time Adobe updater passes a URL it is different in key areas, which Squid interprets as a separate request. This is not abnormal and we have seen this before when we have tried to configure squid to cache Windows updates. However rather than enter a loop of requests, Windows updates simply fail. Other automatic updaters work well with caching systems and indeed most ISPs are now implementing different forms of web caching on their own networks. Dose this mean the Adobe issue is affecting them in the same way?
The issue seems to only affect PCs (or at least we have seen no affected Mac users as yet), and it also seems to affect most Adobe products.
For now Adobe and the ISPs have remained quiet on the issue, however we have 3 other clients (and my own home ADSL ) who cannot update Adobe at all, access to ardownload.adobe.com appears to have been blocked by the ISP. Quite when the Adobe update issue will be resolved is unknown; however we have also taken the decision to block access to ardownload.adobe.com from all of our networks, for the moment.
Richard, one of our Systems Admin Team has published a more detailed account of the technicalities involved here: http://richard.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/12/16/a-big-adobe-problem/
Its been a while………
Dec 15th
It has been a while since I posted to my blog – sorry about that.
There have been a number of reasons: Firstly, things have been very busy here at krayatec and more importantly, Angela and I got married. Thanks to all who came to our wedding and I do hope you all had a good time. We certainly enjoyed ourselves and I’m glad to report that after his wee trip to hospital my grandfather is well; one operation over and waiting on his second.
So what’s been happening around here?
Due to family illness Andrei has decided to return to Canada, so we are now recruiting for his position. To help cover while we recruit a replacement, David will shortly return for Christmas, it’ll be nice to have him back for a while.
We have had some new clients come on stream in the last few months and have seen an large increase in the number of computers covered via our existing clients.
With the VAT changes coming to an end this month, we have also seen a number of large hardware purchases as people seek to take advantage before the VAT rate returns to 17.5%.
There has been lots of other exciting news, some of which I will blog about over the next few months and some of which is already on twitter.
As we approach Christmas, I have also been thinking about new year’s resolutions and well, along with the usual ones like diet and putting the toilet seat down (can’t believe how much that annoys her – such a cliché! ), I have made myself a work resolution to Blog at least once a fortnight and tweet once a day.
We’ll see how I get on… As always, comments welcome.
Krayatec & Krayanet Scheduled Maintenance
Aug 21st
As Part of the Krayatec Scheduled Maintenance Program it is necessary to take every server off line for testing at least once a year.
All of our internal servers will therefore be unavailable between 23:00 BST on Thursday 27th August and 04:00 BST Friday 28th August.
This will have the following Impact:
Email Services;
Some clients will be unable to send or receive email’s from external sources during this time. Email’s sent during this period will however be derived within a few hours of service returning to normal at 04:00
Web Sites:
Our own and some client Web Sites will be unavailable during this time.
Support Services:
Our team will be unable to provide some Support Services during the Maintenance period. We will however be after the maintenance has been completed, in line with standard out of hours support terms.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused, we have deliberately chosen this timing to limit the impact to all customers.
If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to call me directly.
Busy and Exciting times at krayatec
Jun 10th
Well I have struggled to post much over the last few weeks just because it has been such a busy and exciting time for us. So before publishing the monthly security bulletin I wanted to share some of what we have achieved over the last few weeks.
Nine Clients have had new network or servers installed a massive feet and a lot of migration work, all of these are now using Cent OS 5 (Linux) servers and all are using Kerio mailserver. So far so good, a handful of teething issues left and one or two bumps on the road but all in all relatively smooth and no major hick-ups. I think the biggest issue for everyone is that all of this work is included in our unique Strategic Technology Partnership, thus these clients have the best and most up-to-date systems and with no capital out lay for our clients.
Two Windows Servers died, I would say unexpectedly but is the death of a windows server ever unexpected?
The first Windows server to die was during a scheduled and upgrade of their other windows server to Linux this was completely unrelated to Migration as the server that died was not being touched. Unfortunately because of some proprietary software used by the client it had to stay as windows. It turned out to be a hard drive failure, never simple to fix under windows, but luckily they were set up with mirrored drives.
The second Windows failure was more severe and I am really proud of the team, the (new) Client phoned us to say there server had died could we help. Their motherboard was dead and as you may know on windows that’s terminal, and you are looking at a complete server rebuild (3 – 5 days). Well 24 hours later we had completed a full migration and they had a Linux server operational on site. All of their files and documents were recovered, the domain control was restored (samba) and all of their email imported to Kerio Mailserver. Unsurprisingly the clients are very happy and have signed up right away to our Strategic Technology Partnership.
On top of all that we have had a total of four new clients join our Strategic Technology Partnership, which is excellent news and they are all already seeing the benefits of working closely with krayatec and benefiting from our unique style and approach.
So interesting times at krayatec. Now on with the boring monthly security bulletins.
