Until recently I've been happily using DOpus to handle FTP transfers to and from my web space, with Agnitum Outpost firewall sitting in between with default rules for DOpus.
This morning I tried to FTP some files over for the first time in a few weeks and had the request rejected, with the following reported in the DOpus log:
Checking the Outpost log for this session shows the firewall rejecting the connection under Learning Mode, but I'm unable to explicitly allow the connection because the process shows up in Outpost as "N/A" rather than the usual DOPUS.EXE
In the time between FTP working and this morning I have upgraded from DOpus 8 to DOpus 9 and applied a few automatic updates to both Outpost and Windows, so I really need some assistance narrowing down where the problem might have started.
Can anyone tell me if there have been any fundamental changes to the way FTP is handled between versions 8 and 9 of DOpus? If there haven't been any changes I can hopefully eliminate DOpus from the equation and start looking for solutions elsewhere.
For the record my DOpus version is 9.0.0.7 and Outpost is version 4.0.1007.7323 (591)
I don't think anything fundamental has changed in the way Opus creates FTP connections. Seems strange that Outpost is not detecting the process name properly. I would take it up in the Outpost support forums.
Don't know if this is useful but it's something I found:
While I don't use Outpost (did have it install once, and I've used early beta software much more stable than that...thing), I'm almost certain it uses checksums among other things to see if an application have changed since you last allowed it access. As such, when you upgraded your Dopus installation it is no longer the same application as far as the firewall is concerned and it will not (and should not) automatically allow it to connect to the network. If it had done so, you could just rename some malware file to the same as a trusted Windows process, and you'd be sitting there as a new node in a zombie network in no time.
Anyway, I'm sure you knew all that already but I just thought I'd mention it... Soooo, as I briefly mentioned at the start of my post, Outpost usually isn't what I'd consider a stable and reliable piece of software (to put it mildly), so I'd contact their support if I were you
Thanks for the replies. I seem to have found a solution to this but it's still a strangely specific symptom.
A couple of weeks ago I began using a program called Startup Delayer by R2 Studios to handle all the application launch timing and parameter passing during Windows boot, rather than letting the individual programs add themselves to the startup group or registry willy-nilly. It seems to have been working fine. This morning I took control of Outpost away from this program, restored its default startup method, and the DOpus FTP problem has gone away.
I can only hazard a guess that the issue was something to do with the timing between the startup of the Outpost background service and the startup of the control and GUI programs. Although why that should manifest as an obscure issue with one part of an otherwise fully working program is a mystery. DOpus has an Allow All rule in Outpost and the problem wasn't preventing DOpus from doing automatic updates, nor was it preventing any other listed programs from accessing the internet. Just DOpus FTP
[quote="denali_uk"]Thanks for the replies. I seem to have found a solution to this but it's still a strangely specific symptom.
A couple of weeks ago I began using a program called Startup Delayer by R2 Studios to handle all the application launch timing and parameter passing during Windows boot, rather than letting the individual programs add themselves to the startup group or registry willy-nilly. It seems to have been working fine. This morning I took control of Outpost away from this program, restored its default startup method, and the DOpus FTP problem has gone away.
I can only hazard a guess that the issue was something to do with the timing between the startup of the Outpost background service and the startup of the control and GUI programs. Although why that should manifest as an obscure issue with one part of an otherwise fully working program is a mystery. DOpus has an Allow All rule in Outpost and the problem wasn't preventing DOpus from doing automatic updates, nor was it preventing any other listed programs from accessing the internet. Just DOpus FTP
Weird.[/quote]
That's really strange as you say, not the least because as any other security program on Windows, Outpost should (and does) act as a server-client application. This means that the client (in this case, the GUI) never actually processes applications and things like that, but rather just connect to the server (the service) and provides you with the interface to allow/deny access to applications. If it didn't operate this way, it would for instance not function at all with Windows Vista (which Outpost does in their latest beta) seeing as user space applications can not interact at all with anything that runs with full admin access (this has caused me waaay to much grief with certain global hotkeys etc.).
As such, I don't really see any legitimate reason why delaying the startup of the Outpost GUI should have any influence over the operation of the firewall itself, seeing as you have a rule allowing Dopus to connect already. It really sounds like you've encountered a potentially serious bug in Outpost (even if it defaulted to deny instead of allow, who's to say that it would do that always?), so I would really recommend you to report the problem to the devs.
You could try another utility for delaying Outpost though, and see if that matters..? What I am using is the "sleep.exe" function from the UnxUtils (functions ported over from *nix to native Win32), and adds it to a batch file that I link to in the startup folder.
Just do something like this:
@echo off
x:\path\to\unxutils\sleep.exe 20s
x:\path\to\outpost\outpost.exe
If you also set it to run minimized in the shortcut properties, you have an easy and completely free way of delaying your startup programs. If could be worth a shot and see if you get problems with that as well
