Knowledge Base

Check for updates may fail when used through proxies

Category: Installing & upgrading
Date: 28 Dec 2009
Product: all products
The Red Gate "'Check for updates" function available through the Help menu of most Red Gate products may fail to connect to the Red Gate update service if access to the Internet is required to go through a proxy server that requires authentication.

Red Gate's Check for Updates system uses SOAP to communicate with a webservice hosted at update.red-gate.com on TCP port 80. If this connection needs to be made through an HTTP proxy, this is supported by Check for Updates so long as the proxy server integrates with Internet Explorer and has been properly configured in the "Connections" tab of Internet Explorer or using Windows Control Panel's Internet snap-in. In other words, Check for Updates leverages Windows WinInet API to send and receive requests for updates.

If the proxy server does not integrate with Windows and does not support transparent NTLM authentication, Check for Updates will make a last attempt to prompt you for a proxy username and password and try to authenticate using Basic Authentication. Finally, the request will fail with the message "could not connect to the update service".

There are two known circumstances that may cause Check for Updates to fail even when WinInet is properly configured for your proxy server.

  · An automatic configuration script is used to configure the Internet Explorer proxy connection. In this case, the connection properties can be configured differently for every connection. This can cause Check for Updates to behave erratically, sometimes being able to connect and sometimes not.

· A bug in some versions of the Check for Updates code, where any proxy server that does not have a "realm" configured will cause Red Gate Check for Updates to "hang" indefinitely. Contact your proxy administrator to ensure that a realm is configured in the authentication settings.