Paul Beesley

Having taken the overwhelmingly positive feedback from Beta 5 testing over at EduGeek.net, I’ve been hard at work on the next and final beta build. Let’s have a look at what’s changed in this version as it nears release:

More robust definition updates

The online update feature has had a major re-write, bringing a realtime log on-screen and an error log to help trace any issues. The proxy handling code has been updated and should fix the issue some people were seeing with their Squid proxies and NTLM authentication.

On startup, the installed definitions are now verified so that if any definitions are missing or damaged, they will be redownloaded as part of the update. The definition files are now also tested before a new scan begins.

Log files are much, much better

Previously, log files from a scan would be saved with a rather cryptic filename as text files in the ‘logs’ folder. The actual content of a log looked something like this:

#### Scan Summary ####

Scan Date: 10/04/2008 12:02:07
Files Scanned: 518
Errors: 0
Detected Items: 4

#### Detected Items ####

\\nbl-sr-02\student$\My Settings\Favorites\proxy\Freedom Proxy.url
\\nbl-sr-02\student$\My Settings\Favorites\proxy\The OpenDoorNetwork -
Unlock The Internet With Us! Proxy Sites For Work and School - Visit
MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and MORE!! F.url
\\nbl-sr-02\student$\My Settings\Recent\HACKER.lnk
\\nbl-sr-02\student$\My Settings\Recent\pc virus.lnk

Scan completed in 2 seconds.

I’ve been hard at work upgrading the logging code and it’s now able to write (100% valid) html log files, which are just so much easier to work with - now that you can load them in a browser it’s possible to print them with proper formatting and word wrapping, as well as perhaps placing them on a web server for easy access anywhere.

There’s also some new information that’s written to the logs. First, the scan summary now includes the user that started the scan and the time taken. The scan summary looks like this now:

Scan date: 06/05/2008 11:49:53

Scan requested by: paulb

Scan took 11 minutes and 14 seconds to complete.

Number of files scanned: 144150

Number of files detected: 166

Second, and more importantly, the logs show detailed information on errors instead of just a count. Some of the more common errors you may encounter are:

• The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.
• Access to the path ‘C:\System Volume Information’ is denied.

Both of these are normal on a standard filesystem. The second is often triggered by the scanner trying to access system folders and it will continue just fine after skipping them. If a folder is skipped that definitely isn’t a system folder, check that your user account has read access.

The results viewer is much quicker

It’s hard to design a viewer that has to handle several thousand files and stay responsive. Beta 5 could slow down quite a bit if your scan returned a lot of detected items. I’ve added some threads to make loading data and working with files feel much more responsive throughout.

The progress bar bottom right shows the progress of gathering data for the files and populating the list.