MetaChat - Attention AVG Free users

MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.

03 October 2008

Attention AVG Free users Can someone who was getting the AVG 404 error on the recent comments page switch it back on and tell me if you're still getting the same error. Thank you.

post by: seanyboy at: 03:26 | 14 comments

Because of the new AVG free, I now use the free version of avast! instead.

posted by essexjan 03 October | 04:03

Yes, it still does it to me when the toolbar and search-shield is turned on.

posted by DarkForest 03 October | 06:18

Back to the drawing board then... Stay tuned.

posted by seanyboy 03 October | 06:59

Oops, didn't see this thread before commenting in the other one. I use AVG Free 8.0.173 (default installation, up-to-date, no toolbars), FF3.0.3 and Win XP Pro and don't get the error message - the page loads fine. Don't know if that helps.

posted by dg 03 October | 07:21

I'm suspecting that the recent comments url has been blacklisted by AVG for some reason. I'd try changing the recent comments url temporarily for a test (maybe also leaving the old url in place for anyone who might try visiting via bookmark during the test). Don't know how metachat is constructed, so I don't know how hard this would be to try...

posted by DarkForest 03 October | 08:39

If Recent Comments had been blacklisted, wouldn't all of us with AVG 8 be getting the same error?

posted by BoringPostcards 03 October | 08:44

It seems to depend on the toolbar being present in the browser. That might be doing more checking. Don't really know, just a thought.

posted by DarkForest 03 October | 08:45

I forgot about the toolbar... you're right, that could be the difference.

posted by BoringPostcards 03 October | 09:03

I am not a network sniffer expert, but, I captured this response with wireshark:

GET /recent/ HTTP/1.1

Host: metachat.org

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 Firefox/2.0.0.17 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

Referer: http://metachat.org/

Cookie:
[cookie stuff deleted, which oddly seems to contain my apparent alias here, "cono peligroso"]

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:12:00 GMT

Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Debian GNU/Linux) DAV/2 SVN/1.1.4 PHP/4.3.10-16 mod_ssl/2.0.54 OpenSSL/0.9.7e

X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10-16

Status: 200 OK

Keep-Alive: timeout=7, max=100

Connection: Keep-Alive

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Content-Type: text/html

1f8f

Then it goes on into the html for the recent comments page. Could the metachat server be returning 404? even if it is sending the page properly? Need to look at it with something else...

posted by DarkForest 03 October | 09:34

Yes, I still see that 404 error in getting the recent comments page even with AVG toolbar turned off.

Here's wget's take from cygwin:

$ wget -S http://metachat.org/recent/
--10:48:51-- http://metachat.org/recent/
=> `index.html'
Resolving metachat.org... 207.210.244.44
Connecting to metachat.org|207.210.244.44|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:48:53 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Debian GNU/Linux) DAV/2 SVN/1.1.4 PHP/4.3.10-16 mod_ssl/2.0.54 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10-16
Status: 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
10:48:52 ERROR 404: Not Found.

posted by DarkForest 03 October | 09:51

Oh, and sorry if I'm geeking out too much.

posted by DarkForest 03 October | 09:52

I disabled the toolbar (turned out to be easy) and not only was I not hijacked to that page mentioned here but my computer seemed to be snappier on the web.

posted by danf 03 October | 10:04

DarkForest - You're right.
We use a custom 404 page on /Users, /Recent and /Search to provide a "mod_rewrite" style functionality to metachat. I think this comes from a time when we didn't have that much control over the Apache configuration.

I had hoped that I could override the 404 header (which AVG uses to start a redirect), but to no avail. I'm going to look (this weekend) at using either proper pages OR mod_rewrite.

posted by seanyboy 03 October | 10:25

*hugs geeks*

I love it when y'all talk that talk.

posted by taz 03 October | 10:45

← So much for Spring || Photo Friday: Broken Thing, →

HOME || REGISTER || LOGIN