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Paul its up now

dannyres: Doesn't look like it - the blog post hasn't been updated yet. How do you know that the update is available?

I downloaded the Live Mesh installer from Mesh.com and it was the new version..

Trying to install it now and getting a "Live Mesh service is unavailable" message. They must be updating it now.

I removed Live Mesh from the machine on which I installed Windows 7 beta before doing the Win 7 beta upgrade install.  (Just a precaution.)  (And of course I can go back and do a clean install if the updgrade breaks down over time--THAT will get rid of the leftover piece of Norton from a prior removal that Windows is complaining about (and I can't find).

(I also removed OneCare, which was a useful precaution.  I am not expecting anything to happen there.)

I'll put Live Mesh back on in a few days, now that I know there is a compatible version.  But not today--no need to introduce a variable yet.

ken I'm also getting that same error message still.  Glad it's not just me.  They are sure taking their time rolling out this new update!

Here's the latest about the live mesh client  0.9.3424.14 as given in the live mesh blog

blogs.msdn.com/.../service-update-january-13-2009.aspx

Update: Doh!  We are embarrassed to say that the new version is going to be delayed just a little bit longer.  For your safety and enjoyment, the Live Mesh client verifies the SSL certificate of the update server before downloading new code.  It turns out that one of the other things we didn't get to do during the holiday blackout was update our SSL cert, which expired at end of 2008.  As soon as we can get the new valid cert up there, the update will be available.

An expired SSL cert?! Oh, that is so lame. This doesn't inspire confidence. Maybe they should have tested that the update will work before announcing it to the world.

Bad Live Mesh! Bad!

Im facing the same problem as kenmcnamee.

________________

Karthik.K

Microsoft Student Partner

Geez, how long does it take to install an SSL cert? (you know, the one that's for my "safety and enjoyment")

Also, since when is critical infrastructure maintenance just something that "we didn't get to do during" the holidays? Can someone on the Live Mesh team please set an Outlook reminder for December 2009 to update the SSL cert again?

kenmcnamee

Installing a cert (it's a signing cert for the binary and not an SSL cert) and resigning the app doesn't take a lot of time but add that to restarting the process of getting a download installed on a global network of servers is non-trivial. It's really not the same as just copying a file from one machine on your desktop to your web server.

Hey Mike, you may be right but I'm not sure - it depends on what the nature of the actual problem is. From what I can tell, I already have the latest version of the Live Mesh installer on my machine.

The behavior that I'm seeing when I start the installer is that I get the little blue Live Mesh bubble in the lower right corner of my screen. At first it says "Installing Live Mesh software" and, once that is done, it says"Preparing for use." It's at this point that it just hangs for about a minute and then says "Uninstalling Live Mesh software." Finally, it brings up a regular error message box that says "Live Mesh service is unavailable" which apparently means that it couldn't connect with the Live Mesh server because of the expired certificate.

So I don't think the problem is in the global distribution of the Live Mesh installer but in getting the cert and installing it on how ever many update servers there are. I've installed certs before manually, many times. It's not a very long process and can easily be automated as well. My point is that this is an overly long period of time during which the Live Mesh software is unable to be installed anywhere. If the nature of the problem is what they say it is then even older versions of Live Mesh cannot be installed right now. That's not good.

Also, why do you say that the cert they're talking about is for signing the app? The Live Mesh blog post explicitly says that it was their SSL cert that expired.

kenmcnamee

It'll be interesting to see what they say.

btw: I don't get the behavior you're getting. I just get the "Live Mesh is up to date." message when I check for an update.

Ah Mike, that's where our experience differs. You already have Live Mesh installed and I don't yet - well, not on this machine anyways. I'm trying to install it on a fresh Windows 7 64-bit machine that has never seen Live Mesh. By the way, I see the same behavior attempting to install Live Mesh on a virgin XP 32-bit machine as well. So it looks like Live Mesh is not open for business to new customers at the moment.

"it looks like Live Mesh is not open for business to new customers at the moment."

The original was just a technology demo.  I never found a need to use it though.  Did they ever change it to a beta or RTM?

Waethorn

It's currently in beta.

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@mike:

k

Q:  Do you know why there would be hypervisor stuff still lingering in the Windows 7 beta?

The SSL cert has finally been installed and Live Mesh installers now work correctly. As advertised, they fixed the Aero issue in Windows 7.

Thanks Live Mesh team! I apologize for being so impatient. :)

@kenmcnamee, @paul and others: On behalf of the Live Mesh team, I am pleased to accept your dismay and astonishment that we had this SSL problem ;)  As I said in the blog, we are embarrassed.  Our update server topology is fairly complex, since we rely on some other teams at MS to help us get our worldwide scale.  We have to both update the servers in the datacenter that we control, as well as push updates to our partners which they in turn have to prop out.  We do of course have an internal test environment, but the test servers by design are in different domains, and so have different certs.  That's not to say we shouldn't have caught this before posting the announcement, but our approach has been to give users a heads up before we make any deployments, specifically so that if something does go wrong there's something on the blog to indicate what's going on.  In any event, we appreciate everyone's enthusiasm for Mesh, and as always we are listening and learning and (hopefully) improving as we go!

-j

jsenior1981: Thanks for the candor. As missteps go, this was a minor annoyance, like waiting an abnormally long time to receive an email you know was sent. Luckily, it wasn't a problem with the Live Mesh software itself. After all, there's a reason it won best new technology last year. (or whatever the award was called)

Also, thanks for updating the Windows 7 compatibility so quickly. I thought I was going to be forced to choose between Windows 7 and Live Mesh. I would've chosen Windows 7 (no offense) but now I have both.

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