I am a brand-new user of ClamWin, and had a rocky start to the relationship.

I know you guys are old hands at downloading updates and everything, but I had a VERY frustrating time of trying to install a database to my naked new ClamWin Portable install. I got the message that looks like this:


I concluded that my corporate firewall is blocking my access to the IP, and my home pc is not online.

A search finally found me the link to manually download the database.
But you know what?
When I clicked the "download link", it opened the file in a new window as an HTML page filled with ASCI garbage.
The only way I figured out how to install the database to my usb drive was by trial and error.

Please, consider adding a note to the download page that some users might have to Right-click the link and choose "Save Target As" and then browse to the correct ClamWin folder to install the cvd file.

I bet not every newbie thinks to try that.
And I bet if you add it to the FAQ / wiki, you could save some typing when you have to respond repeatedly to this same situation, just give a link. I didn't see it mentioned in my forum search.

Thanks for your attention.
And thank you for providing this forum, I plan to learn a lot here.

Go to https://portableapps.com/support/clamwin_portable for help with ClamWin portable. These forums are for the installed version of ClamWin.

Regards,

For some questions, they refer us back to you guys.
So I thought I would skip the middleman, and come straight here.

The fact that I'm using portable edition has no bearing on the "Save Target As" procedure to download the database, I still feel that tip should be published on the download page.

Thanks anyway.

Right--that right-click Save As option gives you control over anything you are about to download. You can use it to change the name of the file about to be downloaded or to put it in another directory besides your default download directory. It's the same thing as the Save As menu option frequently seen in application software like Excel, Word, etc.

Regards,

The portable guys should probably be using the FreshClam executable to update their definition location rather than instructing their users to manually download them. Alternatively, it would not be too difficult to include a batch script that front-ends "wget" or a simple command line downloader to pull them down for the user.

As far as the website issue when downloading the files... ClamWin.com is not the same as clamav.net. clamav.net hosts all the definitions and their webserver has the .cvd files listed as text/plain instead of application/octet-stream which would tell the browser to save the file instead of trying to "load" it.

@bone
a misconfigured mirror web server may tell text/plain or text/html as mime type
I think ie will download it anyway but firefox will open it as text (as it should)

The discussion seems to have turned away from what I intended and centered on how auto-download should work.

My main problem was that my server blocks me from auto-download.
I am probably not the only one.
PortableApps.com did not tell me to download manually as a standard procedure.
I was FORCED to manually download, and using IE, clicking on the download link opens the file in a window, it did not download it. That's why I had to use right-click, save target as.

My suggestion was that "save target as" should be posted on the download page for those of us who MUST download manually. I still think it's a fairly good idea.

if I understand you have a proxy that needs something like ntlm auth, but freshclam doesn't support proxy auth, so the only way is manual download or check if curl/wget support ntlm auth
in any other cases if you can download from http the cvd you should be able to do the same thing with freshclam

to be honest, I don't have a clue about proxies.

I have NO admin rights on this computer, and the corporate firewall and group policy settings don't let me do anything about fixing the way it blocks auto-download.
I imagine other users in the workplace, school, etc, face the same situation.

But once I figured out the manual download procedure by trial-and-error, it's all good.