Overview

Spam Razer, Anti-Phishing, and the AntiVirus scanning engines are unable to update. All of the products are licensed but none are updating. Both manual updates and the scheduled updates are failing. The server and services have been restarted and the product license is valid. 

Solution

With tracing enabled, the  different logs show proxy and network connection issues:

• \GFI\MailEssentials\Antispam\DebugLogs\audldownload.txt

  2020-09-11,17:28:20,546,1,"#00000e84","#00000fd0","error  ","audldownload","HTTP request failed. Status code: 407"
  2020-09-11,17:28:20,546,1,"#00000e84","#00000fd0","error  ","audldownload","Proxy Access Denied"
  2020-09-11,17:28:20,546,1,"#00000e84","#00000fd0","error  ","audldownload","HTTP request failed. Status code: 407"

• \GFI\MailEssentials\Antispam\DebugLogs\AuSpamRazer.gfi_log.txt

  2020-09-11,17:28:12,580,1,"#00000e84","#00000aa8","error  ","AuSpamrazer","Updating failed due to a network error (no error info available)"

• \GFI\MailEssentials\Attendant\DebugLogs\AutoUpdate.log

  2020-09-11,17:28:58,324,1,"#00001020","#0000000A","error  ","autoupdate","error: ReadCallback exception:The remote server returned an error: (407) Proxy Authentication Required."

Please follow the steps below to ensure that updates work correctly:

Clear old temporary files

Check and purge the content on these folders:

• %temp%
• C:\Windows\Temp

Ensure that updates can go through

The first step is to allow updates through HTTP:

• Open the Windows Registry 
  • From the Start menu, click Run.
  • In the Open box, type regedit, and click OK.
• Create a new DWORD key under 
  • for x86: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GFI\MailEssentials\Config
  • for x86_64: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\GFI\MailEssentials\Config
• Name the new key auhttpallowed and set it's value to 1 HEX.
• Restart the GFI MailEssentials Attendant service which will automatically restart the other GFI services.

For more information about this registry configuration, please visit the Setting MailEssentials to use HTTP to download updates article.

Once enabled HTTP access, please make sure that there aren't any firewall rules that prevent access to the update servers:

GFI MailEssentials downloads updates from the following locations over HTTP ports 80 and 443:

amazonaws.com
cdnupdate.gfi.com
cdnpatches.gfi.com
db11.spamcatcher.net
meupdate.gfi.com
update.gfi.com
update.gfisoftware.com
spamrazer.gfi.com
support.gfi.com
*.mailshell.net
*.rules.mailshell.net

Check Anti-Virus and Backup Exclusions

Updates may fail if the local antivirus marks the downloaded files as malware. Local backup solutions may access update files or folders and thus corrupt the update process. Please make sure you follow the steps in the Recommended Anti-virus and Backup Exclusions article to minimize the risk of corruption.

Check the proxy configuration

Make sure that the credentials supplied to the proxy configuration are correct, as described in the GFI MailEssentials updates are failing when using a proxy article.

If definitions are old but updates don't fail, disable caching on the proxy server for the GFI MailEssentials server or exclude the cdnupdate.gfi.com domain.

Testing

After applying the steps above, updates work correctly.

If the issue still persists, please generate the troubleshooting logs as follows:

• Make sure that you have tracing enabled.
• Wait for at least 30 minutes to gather enough information and for the issue to be reproduced.
• Run the troubleshooter:
  1. Start > Programs > GFI MailEssentials > Troubleshooter
  2. Follow the Log Generation Wizard for collecting the required and pertinent information.
  3. Select New Case when completing the log generation to attach the logs to a new case that will be automatically created, or open a support ticket manually and attach the logs to that ticket, so that the Support team can investigate the problem.