[Ifeffit] problems with updater

[Matt Newville]

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...