I've been proclaiming for several years that Symantec's LiveUpdate Administrator 2.x is a great tool, when used correctly. Let me add a corollary: LUA 2.x works great, when configured correctly.
Here in Tech Support, I have very often seen LUA 2.x servers that were failing in their job to keep all the endpoints updated because their settings were not well suited to their environment. So, here's a quick article that can help LUA admins overcome one common failure: Download failures!
10/10/12 22:26:47 IST |
Download |
CRITICAL |
admin |
Failed to download file "1349882530jtun_ennlu64.aix" while processing request id "446". |
10/10/12 22:33:48 IST |
Download |
CRITICAL |
admin |
Failed to download file "1349881801jtun_ennlu.is4" while processing request id "446". |
10/10/12 22:33:48 IST |
Download |
CRITICAL |
admin |
Download job from source server "Symantec LiveUpdate" has failed. There were "2" updates that failed to download. |
10/10/12 22:34:17 IST |
Download |
CRITICAL |
admin |
Download request "446" started by "admin" has failed. |
Why configure?
Some products kept up-to-date by LUA 2.x have small file sizes and so the server will encounter no trouble at all running with the default values. The new content needed by other products, though - Symantec Endpoint Protection is a good example - has grown and grown. (Millions of threats in circulation means very large AntiVirus signatures). Network interruptions, etc can cause a file to become corrupted during transit and thus an entire LUA download task to fail. This article has some additional information:
How Big are Current Symantec Endpoint Protection Definitions?
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-big-are-current-symantec-endpoint-protection-definitions
Increasing connection timeouts and retry attempts can help LUA to successfully download large files, especially over busy internet connections.
Where to configure?
There are two places where connection settings should be altered: one is in the LUA GUI, and one is in its Tomcat configuration files. The settings configured in Configure > Preferences controls server connection parameters. There is also a lua_static.properties file which take cares of the download failures retries.
First: in the LUA GUI, click on Configure, then Preferences. Scroll down to Server Connections. Increase the timeout, retry and retry interval to improve the chance of successful connections.
TIMEOUT: 120 seconds
RETRY: 5
RETRY INTERVAL: 10 seconds
The second place to change settings is in the file ...\Symantec\LiveUpdate Administrator\tomcat\webapps\lua\WEB-INF\classes\lua_static.properties - lua_static.properties can be opened in notepad, textpad or your favorite text editor. I recommend updating the following values to increase the number of retries and period between retries:
download.retry.corruptFile=3
download.resume.corruptFile.retry=10
download.retry.corruptFile.sleep.msec=20000
download.http.header.acceptRanges=bytes
Do be sure to restart the LUA Tomcat service in order to reflect these changes. Those changes will not go into effect until Tomcat restarts!
What else?
These recommendations are being created in Connect Forum so that LUA admins in the community can post their own observations, advice and feedback to the above. So, please do comment!