Auto update & RAS=1

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Am running Win98

I had earlier problems with my “connections” setting continually reverting to “never dial a connection”, so edited the avast4.ini file by adding the UseRAS=1 entry in accordance with the instructions in the FAQ.

This stopped the “connections” settings changing, but meant that Avast tried to initiate a dial-up connection each time it was started so that it could check for updates. It did not just wait for a connection to be established by another program such as Internet Explorer, then check for updates as I would have expected.

Version 229 was issued which stated that the RAS problem had been resolved, so I removed the useRAS=1 line and everything worked perfectly. Avast 4 would check for database updates automatically as soon as I established a dial-up connection to the internet, it did not try to initiate dial-ups itself, and the connections settings did not get corrupted.

Once v.235 arrived, the “connections” problem came back and settings keep reverting to “never dial a connection”.

I have put the UseRAS=1 line back into the ini file again and although the “Connections” settings now do not get corrupted, Avast4 no longer updates when a dial-up connection is established. When I started up my machine today, it was over 24 hours since machine was last booted, so I do not think that the 4 hour delay between checks for new database should be an issue. There is no attempt by Avast4 to establish it’s own dial-up connection when is starts, so it is not quite the same as pre v.299, but similar.

Any ideas?

With the new releases ( v.229 and later), is it still necessary to use RAS=1 or should this now be a thing of the past?

Snevouk

2

It is still necessary to use the UseRAS setting.

Let me explain this little more. By default, avast uses the PING command to find out whether the computer is online (or, to be more specific, whether it can access at least one of its update servers). The problem with PING is that is causes the ‘Dial a connection’ dialog to appear under Win9x, forcing the user to take an action. That is of course unacceptable, so avast tries to always disable this feature before performing the PING. The problem is, however that unsuccessful PINGs take a lot of time, so in result the ‘never dial a connection’ setting effectively gets activated too often (and for too long time) - in fact almost all the time… Basically, this is caused by the poor design of the dial-up support in Win9x where the ‘never dial a connection’ setting is system-wide, whether it should actually be process-wide (as is almost everything else).

So we added the UseRAS feature that uses a different approach. Instead of the PINGs, it periodically queries the status of the modem. Of course, this only works if you have a dial-up modem (so this setting should never be used if the connection is implemented by other means). In addition, there was a bug in build 229 that caused the modem status query to always succeed… Version 235 should have it right, I believe, but from your post, I’m starting to doubt it… :frowning:

Vlk