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SonicWALL firewall may interfere with Media Center guide downloads

  • Artículo

A couple of folks have reported issues to me via my blog about errors downloading television guide data in Media Center 2005 when they install a SonicWALL firewall device on their network. Our guide download team has debugged this issue on a Media Center system that a Microsoft employee reported this problem on and found the following:

SonicWALL has an option in one of their settings pages (diag.html) which allows you to enable or disable HTTP byte range requests as part of the gateway anti-virus filtering process. If that setting is turned off (which it is by default on the SonicWALL device we debugged on), then guide downloads will not work within Media Center.

If you have a SonicWALL device on your network and cannot get guide download to work, you can use the following steps to resolve this issue:

  1. Navigate to https://<your_router_IP_address>/diag.html from a computer on your network (by default this URL will be https://192.168.168.168/diag.html)
  2. Enable the setting to allow HTTP byte range requests in the gateway anti-virus filtering process
  3. Reboot the SonicWALL firewall device
  4. Attempt to download guide data within Media Center again

The underlying cause for this issue is that the guide download service in Media Center relies on the background intelligent transfer service (BITS) in Windows, and the BITS service requires the ability to request and receive byte ranges to support key scenarios involving data throttling and download restarting.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2006
    Dear Aaron,

    Many many thanks for posting this solution. We ran into this problem with a Sonicwall 2040 and needed some days (with lots of reboots, re-tries and Ethereal captures) just to find out that the problem is indeed caused by the Sonicwall. And without your solution, we would have never found this diag.html setting.

    Perhaps it would help many others, if this solution could be taken into the MCE FAQ on MS' Site?

    Best regards

    Irene
  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2006
    I am facing the same problem, but with a software firewall (Symantec). Would you know what file to allow internet access to in the firewall. I have allowed a bunch of files in the ehome directory, but cannot figure out which one fires up to get the latest guide listing.
  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2006
    Hi Amit - I believe the guide download happens within the ehSched service, so you should be able to grant an exemption to ehSched.exe to solve this in a software firewall. Can you please try that out and see how it goes?

  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2006
    Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I have been trying to resolve this issue with a customer of mine for 6 months.  This change also affects WSUS.  You must do the same procedure for WSUS to work.

    THANK!!!!
  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 17, 2006
    Content File Download Failed: The server does not support the necessary HTTP protocol
  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2006
    Content File Download Failed: The server does not support the necessary HTTP protocol. WSUS Synchronization hangs.
  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2006
    Thanks!!! This solved our problem with WSUS! Thank you so much!