Jeff O'Reilly
End-User Support
Denver Water
I have had OpenOffice installed to my work computer for some time with
no problems. Then I upgraded to OO2.1
The 1st time I launched it, the wizard asked me if I wanted it to
automatically check for updates. I said "yes".
For some odd reason, both our firewall and our web-blocker block much of
the OpenOffice links. I can get to the main website and nearly all
pages, but I'm not allowed to download it. Apparently the automatic
update is also blocked.
What happened was a virtual Denial Of Service attack as the OpenOffice
automatic update service fired off persistent queries a gazillion times
per second, each blocked by our firewall. Without my knowledge, my
computer was pretty much destroying all Internet use at my company for a
few hours - until they tracked the culprit down. I brought up Task
Manager and killed "soffice.exe" and "soffice.bin" while on the phone
with the Systems group. The DOS attack immediately stopped.
Maybe stuff like this is why OpenOffice is blocked from being
downloaded?
The OpenOffice automatic update check needs to be re-thought. It should
not send out perpetual packets the way a running service does. It should
be one-time queries when an OpenOffice application is launched. This is
how Mozilla FireFox does automatic updates and it works great.
If OpenOffice ever hopes to compete, things like this must be solved.
Jeff O'Reilly
