On 8/17/2003 at 5:27 PM, "variable@ednet.co.uk" <variable@ednet.co.uk> wrote:

It's just come back now. Must have been a temporary holding page while they did some maintenance.

On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, variable@ednet.co.uk wrote:

...

Hi all,

I was just updating a couple of Windows machines and had been using Windows Update without any problems until about 5 mins ago (22:10 GMT) when I've started getting this:

"Thank you for your interest in Windows Update

Windows Update is the online extension of Windows that helps you get the most out of your computer.

The latest version of Windows Update is available on computers that are running Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000 (except Windows 2000 Datacenter Server), Windows XP, and the Windows Server 2003 family."

URL is http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/default.asp which redirects to http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/thanks.asp. Also happens for http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/.

This is from multiple machines running Windows 2000 (Pro and Server) and Windows 2003 server. Anyone else seeing this yet?

Does anyone know of an alternative URL for Windows Update in the meantime?

Rich

Not exactly. Windows update has been failing lately when the computer trying to use it is using a web proxy (Squid, etc.). I have tracked this down to said proxies not being able to proxy objects larger than about 1MB in size: some down-the-line chained proxies I administer were running "cache_mem 4 MB" - and that breaks it consistently. Why this breaks M$ Windows update and seemingly little else is beyond me: I don't know the exact fail-over mechanics of Squid, but I have downloaded single files greater than 50MB through proxies with only 8MB cache_mem with nothing unusual happening. bye,Kai