Posts tagged fail

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/

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reCAPTCHA fail!

Oct 16th

Posted by stephen in Kraya

1 comment

We have been adding reCAPTCHA to the comment system on our blog in order to reduce the amount of comment spam we get.

During testing I came across this:

reCAPTCHA fail

Enough said!

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Kerio Mail Server – Feedback and Updates

May 14th

Posted by stephen in Linux

No comments

Kerio have recently introduced a new update for the Kerio MailServer (KMS), which has fast become krayatec’s favoured mail server.

We have now deployed Kerio MailServer 6.2 to most of our clients and despite a handful of teething problems, most are now seeing advantages over Exchange and their previous IMAP based systems.

Feedback from clients has generally been positive, however for two of our clients the switch has not been as pain free as we would have liked and they are still experiencing several issues:

VERY Slow connections between the Kerio Outlook connector and the Server.
Kerio Outlook Connector seems to consume huge amounts of RAM, particularity on older Systems.
Outlook and MS Word Mail merge function seams to fail after installation of Kerio Off-line Outlook connector. This issue is still under investigation by both our own and Kerio’s Technical teams.
IMAP sync issues when using Thunderbird: Kerio and Thunderbird seem to be unable to share junk, sent and deleted folders leading to duplication.
Thunderbird and Kerio integration is not perfect in general and Thunderbird is unable to feed back junk mail training data, or rule learning, to the Kerio Mail Server.

The release notes for the new Update to Kerio MailServer 6.7 suggests that this upgrade will fix most of these issues. The update has now been deployed to our own Kerio system and we are currently testing this in full prior to deployment to our clients systems. After discussing the updates with the Kerio team, we are very hopeful of resolving the above issues. However, it is indisputable that issues may remain with legacy systems, particularity Windows 2000.

Feedback / comments and suggestions for the above issues are always welcome.

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So what does my computer do over night?

Apr 22nd

Posted by stephen in Kraya

1 comment

Since my last blog post, Save the Planet, DON’T Turn your Computer off at night, I have been getting a lot of enquiries from people asking, exactly what happens over night, what about laptops and asking about energy usage and Carbon foot prints.

For laptops the power management setting needs to be set correctly and they should be left turned on and plugged into the internet at least one night a week. For all other computers it is vital that the following procedure is followed at the end of each working day.

Select Start and Shutdown, from the drop down menu select Restart
Please do not shut down.
Please turn off the monitor and leave your computer to restart.
The machine will restart back to the log in screen and will after 10 to 15 minutes go into a power save mode.
Given that your monitor is turned off and the hard drives will also go to sleep, the computer will not use much power.
At the weekend, (unless you are pre-notified of a large update in advance) Shut-down should be used but please also remember to turn off the monitor.

So what exactly does my computer do over night? Well below is a typical example.

20:30 Receiving Updates from Server

Microsoft and other updates are pushed out nightly there will not be an update every night. However given the number of different software packages in use there is something most nights

21:00 Installing those Updates

22:00 Cleaning temporary and system files, Deleting all of those
temporary files you downloaded over the course of the day.

22:15 De-fragmenting the hard drive, De-fragmenting your Operating
System, in English, tidying up the filing cabinets, so that it can find things faster the next day.

23:00 De-fragmenting any secondary drives.

00:15 Receive Anti-Virus Updates

00:30 Full Anti-Virus Running a full in depth scan on your operating
system

03:30 Full Anti-Virus on secondary drives

06:00 System re-starts, clearing memory ready for you coming into work.

One of the main concerns people have is regarding energy, the cost of that energy and their carbon foot print. Yes leaving the computer on, even in power save mode, uses power and increases your carbon foot print, but this must be balanced with the cost of buying a new PC and the carbon generated by the manufacturing process, flying the parts around the world and shipping the new PC to your office. The Mathematics for this are very complex and depending on the life of the PC replacing more frequently will ultimately be much more expensive, than running it over night.

The greatest advantage to the overnight maintenance procedures is improved day time efficiency, not only in terms of general performance, but energy efficiency. Because of this improved day time computer efficiency the processor doesn’t have to work as hard during the day. It might seem simple but this means it can perform most tasks at less than full speed, this saves power and results in less heat being generated, thus in turn also results in less energy being used to dissipate this heat. Hence greater daytime energy efficiency and lower carbon foot print, from day time usage. The mathematics of balancing these daytime savings versus increased night time usage, are personal to each computer and its use.

Overall I believe the benefits are clear, and all of the users who have had the overnight maintenance schedule fully implemented seem to agree, at least in terms of performance.

Your comments are welcome.

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Save the Planet, DON’T Turn your Computer off at night.

Apr 3rd

Posted by stephen in Uncategorized

2 comments

As I listened recently to Forth One talking about the WWF earth hour, and set a reminder on my phone to do my bit and turn off the lights at 8.30 pm on Saturday 29th March. I couldn’t help reflecting on several recent discussions about people about turning off computers at night. I bet that every night before you leave the office you turn your Computer off to save energy and money?

Well it’s not quite that simple, in a recent straw poll 80% of people who selected shut-down from the start menu, left their PC to do the rest, expecting it to turn the monitor off? If this is what you do, you should keep reading.

Your monitor will stay on Standby all night long. That dreaded stand by, uses almost as much power as leaving the monitor turned on. If you really want to save energy and money, leave the computer on and turn the monitor off. Some people will of course suggest that you turn the computer off as well, saving yet more energy, a valid point to some extent, but it depends on how much you use the computer, there are other factors to consider.

If we look at the consuming components in your computer, your Monitor, the Processor and the Hard drive and how these work, your computer should be programed with energy saving settings, these will;

After a predefined idle period it will power down the hard drives, only powering them back up when needed.
If your processor if less than a few years old it to will work at varying speeds (my 2.8GHz Dual core Laptop is currently only using 0.8 Ghz on one core) the speed reductions mean firstly that it is producing less heat and using less electricity to dissipate that heat. This is an important point, after all the office is cold at night, because you turn the heating off at night? Right? Then given that a almost half of the energy your processor uses it uses to trying to dissipate heat, that’s a large energy saving.
Most Importantly you have already turned your monitor off.

But why is this important, why not just turn it off? First of all, overnight we run system updates and Anti Virus scans, Monday to Friday there is something running every single night. Its important to help your computer work faster when you come in each morning that is has been updated, Anti virus Scaned,

Cleaned and De-fragmented (tidied up) the night before. Most importantly by keeping your computer in tip top condition with automated cleaning you help prolong its useful life. Ok so you may reduce the longevity of the hardware components inside, but how often have you had to replace a whole computer because the hard ware failed? More often than not a computer is replaced because you feel that is it running slowly and cant cope any more.

What’s more, there is an argument that turning things on and off all the time damages the components more than leaving them turned on all the time. All of this has to be considered in context by doing this you will probably help to extend the useful life of your computer by around 6 to 12 months, and will vastly improve its performance. If your not convinced ask someone who as sent their PC in for our Kraya Day Spa and see what they say about the performance improvement they have experienced.

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Technological Ramblings by Stephen

Stephen Ramsay is the Head of Krayatec Edinburgh’s leading Linux centric IT Support Company. We provide IT Support, telecoms and technology partnerships to businesses running Windows, Linux and Apple based systems. We also manage the complete and seamless integration of, all these operating systems into one coherent, network and technology strategy.
This blog is part work, part personal, so I hope you enjoy the mix and feel free to leave some comments, reply via Twitter, or drop me an Email for more information, on anything you read here, or to find out a bit more about what we do and how we do it.
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Posts tagged fail

Adobe update – excessive traffic to ardownload.adobe.com

reCAPTCHA fail!

Kerio Mail Server – Feedback and Updates

So what does my computer do over night?

Save the Planet, DON’T Turn your Computer off at night.

Technological Ramblings by Stephen

Categories

Tag Cloud

blogrol

Kraya

Open Source Software

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