Hi Peter, I doubt it has much to do with proxy settings or any kind of virtual private network, except to the extent that thses can slow down connection times. The updater program is giving up too soon before it connects to and retrieves the updata.dat file from cars9.uchicago.edu. The updater has a 'timeout' of 15 seconds hardwired into it for retrieving this file: if it can't download this tiny file in that time, it decides that you can't reach the server. the thought was that 15sec was a reasonable amount of time to get such a tiny file and testf 'are you connected to the internet and are all the servers up?'. For most cases, waiting longer than 15sec to decide that you can't reach the server would seem painfully slow. From a dial-up machine half way around the world, it might not be long enough. Does this timescale seem reasonable to you??? How long does it take for you to download updater.dat by hand? I'll make this initial timeout customizable (set in updater.ini) for the next version. I should mention that once the updater.dat is found and updates need to be downloaded, this timeout is increased to 30minutes. I'll make that "max time to spend downloading" configurable too. Turning off a proxy might help and is easy enough to try. Other than that, downloading the zip files by hand and installing by hand (unzipping into C:\Program Files\Ifeffit) should work too. Hope that helps. It's quite possible that others are seeing the same issue. And thanks for all the FAQ entries!! --Matt On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Peter Southon wrote:
Hello all,
I'm just wondering if anyone else has come across this problem that I'm having with ifeffit updater (from version 1.2.5). Whenever I run it (after re-setting the updater.ini date stamp as Matt suggested) it returns the error "cannot connect to http://cars9.uchicago.edu/ifeffit/updates//updater.dat" However, this file can be read using my web browser. This is using my home WinXP computer using a university dial-up - so there should be no network differences from my work computer (on which it works fine). Could proxy settings interfere?
I'd appreciate any suggestions people have...