On 03/02/2007 11:40 AM, O'Reilly, Jeff wrote: > 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 >
That sounds as if it's a bug and a rather serious issue. A few questions: 1. Have you now turned off the Online Update? Tools|Options|OpenOffice.org|Online Udate and if so did that fix the problem? 2. Was there any data captured by your Systems Group that they'd be willing to share? They should be able to look at their firewall logs to see what the repeated requests were. That would be most helpful in a bug report. I see from your post that you are using Windows. I use linux & in my 2.1 version I see Tools|Options|OpenOffice.org|Online Udate to check: Every Day, Every Week, Every Month. Can you tell us which you had checked? >From what I gather, the check for update uses a simple http request: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Update_Notification_Protocol I'm wondering if perhaps your installation is corrupt and when it performed this check it just kept trying. It could also be caused by a virus on your system. One way to test so that it doesn't affect your company firewall would be to install a outbound software firewall client on your computer such as ZoneAlarm to temporarily see what the requests are. You might check with your Systems Group to see if they can help you with this. All you'd need to do is: 1) install ZoneAlarm, 2) at the first instance of OOo attempting to access the internet deny it, 3) look at the program and alarm logs to see what it attempted to access and if it keeps trying repeatedly. Of course, you'd need to have Tools|Options|OpenOffice.org|Online Udate turned on when testing. If you know how, file a bug. If not, please provide any additional information as listed above so that someone can file one for you. If OOo has a valid issue such as this then it needs to be fixed. If, on the otherhand, it is your computer with a virus, trojan, etc., that needs to be fixed as well & OOo cleared so that your Systems Group & company don't get gun shy regarding OOo installations on their network. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
