111 replies to this topic

[StephenR0]

No, I don't. I just grepped the scripts to extract all the urls and edited the file by hand. It wouldn't be too hard to come up with a sed or awk script to create the same shell script in an automated manner. If we could tell apup to look in a directory for it's files instead of being hardwired to go to the urls, that would make things much more convenient.

[PsiMoon314]

Hi,

Well the download progress goes from bad to worse as far as I can see.

Comparing APUP with CT Offline Update shows that the MS web site is not the issue as the latter tool can download the individual hotfixes without crashing, stalling or otherwise throwing a fit and do this quickly.

I repeat my call for the downloading code within APUP to be radically overhauled to resolve these issues urgently. If all else fails then use WGET or some other external tool to manage the actual downloading.

If this does not happen then I am afraid that this project will stall as badly as the downloads currently do, which would be a great shame.

Kind Regards

Simon

[sh1leshk4]

Antonis is probably already aware of this and doesn't need to be reminded again and again but does need some time for his personal life.
If in the mean time you can't be satisfied with APUP at its current condition you could just use that alternative tool and probably continue to use that if APUP won't meet your expectations in the next few months.

Me, I just use what I've used for a long time.
From my view, it's better to stick and find new errors and reporting it rather than leaving for another tool right away.
I always give half a year time; if no updates are present, then I should use other tool.

Besides, aside from the stalling issues, the scripts are updated frequently by Erik.
There also "scripts and patches verifier" such as Cristiano and others.
So this project isn't really dead, from my point of view.

[PsiMoon314]

Hi,

Well sorry for breathing in and out I'm sure!

It must be really annoying for you when folks report issues which make a product basically unusable. Still I am sure that all the wishing in the world will magically fix APUP so that it actually does work.

Unless the basic functions of APUP actually work correctly then updating the scripts seems to be a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The ship will still sink even when the deck chairs are neatly rearranged.

Perhaps it would be easier to just post the folder structure for APXP and other AP products minus the actual hotfix executables and let folks download them some other way.

This would at least make is possible to keep AP updated manually while the code issues with APUP are resolved.

Regards

Simon

[sh1leshk4]

"Basically unusable"...well, yeah, intermittently that is.
It's unusable when it stalls, but just how often these stalls are I don't really know; YMMV.
Personally, I don't find it "unusable" to rerun APUP a few times for the first, "massive" download.
Because for the next incremental downloads, I don't have to download as much and as long as the first, thus decreasing the stalling "chance", and lately I didn't experience any.

Might've been pure luck, so you might want to put up a poll for counting just how many users find APUP at its current state to be unusable.

"Some other way" then that would be using another alternative like the one you suggested.
Besides, why bother using the deck chairs from a sinking ship?


Cheers. =)

Edited by sh1leshk4, 28 December 2007 - 02:00 PM.

[italianstyle]

as said, here is something you can try.
please install 7zip (free archive manager) before running or maybe 7z command line would give errors.
simple script to get apup + patches <-- edit
updated one
notes: mmmm nothing to say by now...

edit2: Apup 1.0.4 seems to work fine now, please use it instead of this script. Remember to run apup with the /log switch to help developers solving further problems (if any)

Edited by italianstyle, 27 March 2008 - 10:53 AM.

[Krissy]

Hi all!!! Was having the same problem with it hanging. It took three times of clearing the directory where APUP was located and starting fresh. I stopped having the hanging issue once I cleared the updates for OFFICE. Unchecked ALL Office updates and just tried it with OS updates. It worked like a dream. Worked in on three different units and worked every time. Not sure why Office was causing the hang ups but I am speculating that it shifted servers for those updates and perhaps that caused the issue.

Anyway that's how I got it too work 4 me

Krissy

[StephenR0]

italianstyle, on Dec 29 2007, 03:52 PM, said:

as said, here is something you can try.
please install 7zip (free archive manager) before running or maybe 7z command line would give errors.
simple script to get apup + patches

notes: mmmm nothing to say by now...

It looks pretty good. And it almost worked. When apup fires up, it still thinks there's a few files left to download. Since in my case it hangs on every file, it didn't get very far. With my previous experiments, there seemed to be an empty directory that needed deleted. But I can't find a case of that this time, although there are a lot of directories to search through. I may try again and modify the scripts to do a little more logging. Do you have any idea why apup seems to think it doesn't have all the files? I'm downloading everything for XP and Office 2003.

Edited by StephenR0, 31 December 2007 - 09:39 PM.

[Cyrus]

Have you updated apup from the first list?

[StephenR0]

Italianstyle's scripts take care of downloading the latest apup from the appropriate place and that's the one that's called from the scripts. At this point, I don't see how it could fail to be up to date. You might want to look at what he's done. It's quite interesting. It's basically a way to download all the files with a win32 version of gnu wget and then call apup to take care of the rest. At least in my case, there just seems to be a small mismatch between what is downloaded and what apup expects. But I'm not really sure why this is.

[Erik Ramey]

I do have to say that Wget is pretty crude looking but it's doing the job.

[StephenR0]

Ok, I tried Italianstyle's scripts again in an empty directory. This time I tried to get more detail on the last part of the process. As I mentioned before, everything appears to go perfectly well during the download. After the download, the scripts start apup, presumably with a fully populated modules subdirectory. But apup processes the modules directory for a long time and finally decides that it needs to download maybe three files. The first file downloads without a problem. It went by pretty fast, but I think it was .\Components\journalviewer_enu_files\setup.exe. Attempting to download the next file hangs everything. The file it's trying to download is .\wga\wga_files\windowsxp-kb892130-enu-x86_eebc1bd82ff4bc7b8eb46773704ffd5f8eef14aa.exe, which already seems to be there. From the looks of the progress bar, there may be another file that it wants to download after that. But I don't know what that is. I suspect that most people wouldn't have any problem with these scripts. But for whatever reason, I can't use apup to download more than one file before it hangs.
Hopefully, this helps someone.

[StephenR0]

Success! I deleted .\wga\wga_files\windowsxp-kb892130-enu-x86_eebc1bd82ff4bc7b8eb46773704ffd5f8eef14aa.exe and apup was able complete the download of the file and that seemed to be the last file. I had to run apup with a log to really determine that, though. Then I ran Autopatcher and was able to completely update this machine without problems. Again as I've said before, this all was done on a network drive which is a Samba share on a Linux server. I guess I've experimented enough for now. :-) Kudos to Italianstyle for his useful scripts. Thanks.

[italianstyle]

StephenR0, on Jan 2 2008, 04:03 PM, said:

Italianstyle's scripts take care of downloading the latest apup from the appropriate place and that's the one that's called from the scripts. At this point, I don't see how it could fail to be up to date. You might want to look at what he's done. It's quite interesting. It's basically a way to download all the files with a win32 version of gnu wget and then call apup to take care of the rest. At least in my case, there just seems to be a small mismatch between what is downloaded and what apup expects. But I'm not really sure why this is.

thanks for the comments
as you could have seen after the download with wget I lauch apup to check if everything is fine (m5d hashes) and of course to let apup do all the cleanings provided by the original scripts that I haven't implemented.
so maybe the files apup downloads have bad hashes or they simply aren't there because my parser didn't catch them... I haven't checked...
bye

[FrizzleFry]

There is a pretty old version of wget included in Italianstyle's scripts pack.
GNU Wget 1.5.3.1 in apupMod dated 1999-07-01
GNU Wget 1.10.1 available from GnuWin32 site dated 2005-08-18

I doubt it affects anything but I prefer to run current versions of tools.

Edited by FrizzleFry, 03 January 2008 - 08:19 PM.

[italianstyle]

FrizzleFry, on Jan 3 2008, 09:18 PM, said:

There is a pretty old version of wget included in Italianstyle's scripts pack.
GNU Wget 1.5.3.1 in apupMod dated 1999-07-01
GNU Wget 1.10.1 available from GnuWin32 site dated 2005-08-18

I doubt it affects anything but I prefer to run current versions of tools.

thanks!!
i've updated the files and added some verbose to wget, too. here the link
updated apupMod

ps: now apup.exe starts with /log switch at the end of download process
pps: i don't check for apup.exe existence so always select apup script!!

edit:removed link, refer to previous post

Edited by italianstyle, 27 March 2008 - 10:55 AM.

[just4awhile]

Hi Guys,
After the calamity in Sept I got lost for awhile but now I've got back to work and just downloaded apup.exe and with the exception on one small glitch (which I caused) it works great. Did both 2K and XP 32bit without a hitch. Great job (637MB in 17 minutes with no freeze).
But one question, autopatcher.exe posts a red 'unofficial bla bla' on the header graphic. I understand why but can I use the old way, NSIS to generate the .exe? My boss might get 'jumpy' if he sees that.

Thanks again, great job.

[sh1leshk4]

That might due to the frequently updated scripts but AP itself doesn't "recognize" the updates, hence the "Unofficial" mark.
I think the hashes for the .apm files are built-in into AP so that no one may modify it.

[Cristiano]

sh1leshk4, AP is currently running also beta version. so, none of current test releases shall be signed to remove that "unofficial" tag

[just4awhile]

Thanks. After reading your post I went and looked at the release.list and sure enough it still in beta. Thanks again for the quick reply.