Wednesday 28 May 2008

Windows Live Mesh

I recieved my invite to Live Mesh today and found it would not install and reported that I should check my network settings: "Installer encountered errors: Please verify your network settings and attempt to reinstall".

Well all was fine with my network settings. I tried setting my locale to US as suggested on some site and ensured that UAC was switched on. I then tried changing my auto proxy configuration script to a hard coded proxy (in IE connection settings) and Live Mesh then installed. So if anyone else sees this error and you are using an automatic configuration script for your proxy, that is why.

Hopefully Microsoft will fix this at some point.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi I have the same problem but I am using auto proxy but I don't know how to change it to hard coded. Can you teach me how?

Thanks
Elin

Rob Head said...

Sure, I'll try Elin.

If you are using a work machine (which presumably you are as you have an auto-config script) the first thing you need to do is make sure you can change your proxy settings. In IE, select Internet Options from the Tools drop down menu. In the IE options window click Connections and then click LAN settings. Make sure you can tick "Use a proxy server for your LAN" and untick "Use automatic configuration script". If you can't do any of these steps because things are grayed out or disabled, you will need to speak to your IT admins about releasing the policy lockdown.

Assuming you can change your proxy setting, you now need to work out what you proxy server is. If you don't know this and don't have anyone to ask, you can get the info from the auto config script.

To get the info from the auto config script, go back to LAN settings as before and copy and auto-configuration script path. Close Internet options and paste the path you copied into the IE path field and load the page. You should be prompted to download a file. Save the auto-config file somewhere and then open it in Notepad or Word (it may be easier to load notepad/word and then open the saved file).

Towards the end of the auto-config script you will see a TAG that says: "PROXY " This tag is immediately followed by the name and port of your proxy server (the port is after the : ).

Go back to LAN Settings in IE, untick auto-config script, tick to select the "Use a proxy server for your LAN" and enter the proxy server name and port you found in the auto config script. You probably also want to tick the option to "Bypass proxy server for local addresses". Click ok a few times and thats it.

Although this should now allow you to use the Mesh, you may notice that you get prompted for passwords on company based sites you never used to be prompted on. If you do you should speak to your IT people and get them to further customise the manual proxy configuration to match what is set in the configuration script. Obviously you can always switch back to the auto-config script by selecting the option again in LAN Settings.

Hopefully MS will fix this soon.

Good luck.