Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[surfer1000]

Hi, because i ran live update and saw that at the stage 2 of 3 that it downloaded 93.9 megs

[AllenM Norton Fighter]

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surfer1000 wrote:
Hi, because i ran live update and saw that at the stage 2 of 3 that it downloaded 93.9 megs

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Hi surfer1000,

I'm going to run this up the flag pole to Symantec and see what comes back.

Accipiter, have you seen any further occurrences of this?

Best wishes.

Allen

[Accipiter]

Hello Allen

All has been fine since I last wrote, until this morning. LU began an update shown as 4 mb, but it failed to update virus 2011 successfully. No error codes, and System Status = Secure. Reran LU, and exactly as before, it wanted to download 94mb (These are the numbers of mb that LU displays during its download).

So, absolutely no change from my original problem. Any further thoughts would be gratefully received.

Regards

Accipiter

[Accipiter]

Hello Allen

Following my post yesterday, I ran LU early this morning and let it download its 94.56MB, which it did successfully. I later ran LU and forced an interruption by powering off my router during the update. LU of course reported it had failed to complete all updates. There were no error codes, and Status showed Secure.

History reported that "Norton Activity Map Data" had failed to update. I started LU again, and  it reran just this one component successfully.

From observation over the past few weeks, I can say the nub of the problem is this:

 It's only when LU fails to successfully update "Norton Virus Definitions" that it then wants to download 90MB plus the next time it is run.

I hope this might shine some light to find exactly what is going on with LU.

Kind regards

Accipiter

[surfer1000]

I totally agree with the above post, as previously advised my initial update was shown as cancelled and then it did the big download, and it was the virus definitions that was the 93.9 megs. So this can surely be replicated by everyone ?

[AllenM Norton Fighter]

Hi Accipiter and surfer1000,

Thanks for the updates. I am still working this with Symantec and I don't doubt that it has something to do with antivirus defs but thus far I have not been able to reproduce it. On a couple of my tests I did manage to disrupt the antivirus portion of the live update and it still just picked up where it left off when I ran LU again.

I'm going to mess around with it a bit more.

More to follow, I have not forgotten about this.

Best wishes.

Allen

[Accipiter]

Hello Allen and Surfer1000

It might be worth adding that when I forced LU update to fail, I did so be powering off the router. The router always takes several minutes to re-establish its connection from power up, and LU had timed out before the connection back was up. I've tried this since, and LU seems to time out with an update failure a few minutes after the line is lost.

Again, thanks for you tenacity with this problem.

Accipiter

[AllenM Norton Fighter]

Hi Accipiter,

Have you ever been able to reproduce the LU problem by doing this testing? Of course I know it happens randomly on its own after an LU failure but can you actually "make" it happen by shutting down the router during LU?

My testing has involved similar methods. I have tried the following:

1. Turning off the wireless adapter on my test laptop during LU. Have done this multiple times.

2. Since #1 involves having to run LU manually I started thinking perhaps the problem only happens following failures of automatic live update. So I got creative and made some configuration changes on my router to use traffic metering feature. I was able to have the router shut down the internet connection after a certain amount of MB has been downloaded. Then I just waited for automatic live update to run. I was able to cause multiple failures of automatic live update but once again I could not reproduce the problem where LU wanted to start over again.

One thing I did notice is that in my history log the status column for Live Update shows Completed but when I bring up the details it shows that it failed to download certain components. The Severity shows Medium in these cases where the normal severity is Info.

Surfer1000 mentioned earlier that Status showed Canceled after an LU failure. When you look in history to a failed LU event which immediately preceeded LU wanting to download the entire definition set, what does the Status column show on yours?

Best wishes.

Allen

[Vineeth]

Hi Accipiter and surfer1000,

I've sent you a Private Message ( icon on the top right corner of the forums page). Please check this when you get a chance.

Thanks!

Vineeth

[Accipiter]

Hello Allen and Vineeth

With regard to the last paragraph of your post of 28 Feb (Allen). I checked back through my history to the last failure (0904 26/2/11) prior to a 94MB retry: the severity is medium and status shows complete. Under more details, it shows 6 updates with "Norton Virus Definitions failed to complete".

Once the 94MB retry began, I immediately cancelled it: the severity shown was then low, and status cancelled

I have also tried forcing failures by repeatedly disconnecting and reconnecting the cable during an update, but  I have been unable to repeat the problem. LU completes, having successfully handled the interruptions.

As I said in an earlier post, if I disconnect the cable or power down whilst running LU, and leave LU to time out, then I get exactly the same result as in my first paragraph above. The difference being that under "more details" the failed item has always been something other than Virus defs. It's always a Virus defs failure that seems tp precipitate a full download on an LU retry.

Vineeth. Thanks for your mail. I have tried deleting the contents of the download folder and rerunning LU some time ago, but this hasn't solved the problem. I have also run Norton Removal Tool, downloaded, and installed a fresh copy of NIS 2011, but again to no avail.

Regards,

Accipiter.