Windows update down again?

Mon Aug 18 15:18:42 UTC 2003

On 8/17/2003 at 5:27 PM, "variable at ednet.co.uk" <variable at ednet.co.uk> wrote:

> It's just come back now.  Must have been a temporary holding page while 
> they did some maintenance.

> On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, variable at ednet.co.uk wrote:

>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I was just updating a couple of Windows machines and had been using 
>> Windows Update without any problems until about 5 mins ago (22:10 GMT) 
>> when I've started getting this:
>> 
>> "Thank you for your interest in Windows Update
>> 
>> Windows Update is the online extension of Windows that helps you get the 
>> most out of your computer.
>> 
>> The latest version of Windows Update is available on computers that are 
>> running Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 
>> Millennium Edition, Windows 2000 (except Windows 2000 Datacenter Server), 
>> Windows XP, and the Windows Server 2003 family."
>> 
>> URL is http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/default.asp which redirects 
>> to http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/thanks.asp.  Also happens for 
>> http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/.
>> 
>> This is from multiple machines running Windows 2000 (Pro and Server) and 
>> Windows 2003 server.  Anyone else seeing this yet?
>> 
>> Does anyone know of an alternative URL for Windows Update in the meantime?
>> 
>> Rich

Not exactly. Windows update has been failing lately when the computer trying
to use it is using a web proxy (Squid, etc.). I have tracked this down to said
proxies not being able to proxy objects larger than about 1MB in size: some
down-the-line chained proxies I administer were running "cache_mem  4 MB" -
and that breaks it consistently.

Why this breaks M$ Windows update and seemingly little else is beyond me:
I don't know the exact fail-over mechanics of Squid, but I have downloaded
single files greater than 50MB through proxies with only 8MB cache_mem with
nothing unusual happening.

bye,Kai