Does "Use Analytics to Improve Cakewalk" always search for internet on startup?? or is it something else??

[GTsongwriter]

Hi,

I have Cakewalk on a computer that has a INTRANET (not INTERNET) and it pauses for over a few minutes at startup before searching for plug-ins.

I have a INTRANET, not a INTERNET, setup on this machine.  I have "Use Analytics to Improve Cakewalk" turned on to help CakeWalk, but I only enable internet once a month on this computer.

If I completely disable INTRANET, cakewalk will skip the pause and load fast.

What can I do to keep the INTRANET enabled and have cakewalk stop looking for the INTERNET on startup????

Your advise and help is much welcomed!

 

[Keni]

Oops

Edited November 24, 2022 by Keni
Ooops, wrong thread

[bvideo]

When you are in INTRANET mode do you have a DNS that will return a failure notice right away when some program makes a name request?

[GTsongwriter]

4 hours ago, bvideo said:

When you are in INTRANET mode do you have a DNS that will return a failure notice right away when some program makes a name request?

I am no technical communications wizard, just know we run our computers on a intranet that has no internet connection to the outside world.

I asked a tech for a better explanation and all he told me is that we are connected but not connected to the Internet.  In other words, in order to keep the licenses good with Cakewalk and other software, the computers connect to the Internet once a month, on a rotation, per application.

For what we use the intranet is to keep all computers connected to a massive internal library and network.

Not all the computers are designed for the same purpose.  Mine is for Musical Creation programming.

Does anyone know how to turn off CakeWalk for searching for Internet connection if it thinks we are connected to any network??  It fails everytime, but I've gotta wait for the timeout every time!! It's highly annoying!  Especially when your creating VST3 plugins that your trying to fix crash issues on!

[GTsongwriter]

4 hours ago, bvideo said:

When you are in INTRANET mode do you have a DNS that will return a failure notice right away when some program makes a name request?

Another problem with that DNS stuff is, if you do return 0.0.0.0, it will still try it and still wait for a timeout.  A lot of programs aren't built very smartly.

I know this because on another network we have runs pi-hole.

Edited November 24, 2022 by El Diablo

[Noel Borthwick]

How long is the timeout? It's probably doing the check for updates and timing out. It's quite fast when there is really no Internet but perhaps when it's on a lan with no Internet it's less efficient. 

I've now changed the API to check for an internet connection so perhaps it will improve.

How do I test your use case - just have a lan connection with no Internet?

[Xoo]

32 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

It's quite fast when there is really no Internet but perhaps when it's on a lan with no Internet it's less efficient. 

I've seen this when my router fails to connect to the internet, but my PC connects to the router fine (the router hosts the local DNS server too) - CbB (and some plugins, like Overloud ones) take an age to start under these conditions.  If the internet connection is present, even if it's slow, the start up time is fast.

[Noel Borthwick]

It so turns out that there is no Windows API to reliably detect no internet when you are going through a network/router. The known API's report a valid connection even when the router actually has no internet! Likely because from the point of view of Windows it is "connected".
I actually tested the API's and they report internet connectivity even though its dead. Windows itself actually pings the microsoft servers to check for internet.
See this article.

https://blog.superuser.com/2011/05/16/windows-7-network-awareness/

So in a nutshell the only way we can prevent this lag while checking, is by doing the check asynchronously.  I'll look into this for a future version...

[Xoo]

I thought it might be something like that...Windows (and Android for that matter) definitely gets confused with odd networking!

[Noel Borthwick]

It's probably not windows itself. Same issues on Mac. I don't think the OS knows if there is no Internet without actually attempting a connection. I was hoping it would return a cached state immediately but apparently not.

[Xoo]

Ah...I guess it waits on the router as it might be having just a blip, so doesn't want to say fail immediately.  How about a ping to a known IP (that is ICMP enabled) so DNS is taken out of the equation too?

Google DNS maybe? 4.4.4.4 and 8.8.8.8 from memory (internal DNS cache obviously :-)).

[GTsongwriter]

15 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

It's probably not windows itself. Same issues on Mac. I don't think the OS knows if there is no Internet without actually attempting a connection. I was hoping it would return a cached state immediately but apparently not.

How about instead of daily checking the internet, let there be a option that will notify you to setup your internet for a check every 30 days on startup?  If you then, don't connect to the internet, then just keep checking for internet daily until this event is satisfied.  Once satisfied, count out another 30 days.

For collection of data for helping cakewalk improve cakewalk, maybe have it save the data to a file, daily, that can be transferred on that 30 day mark?

What do you think?

 

[GTsongwriter]

13 hours ago, Kevin Perry said:

Ah...I guess it waits on the router as it might be having just a blip, so doesn't want to say fail immediately.  How about a ping to a known IP (that is ICMP enabled) so DNS is taken out of the equation too?

Google DNS maybe? 4.4.4.4 and 8.8.8.8 from memory (internal DNS cache obviously :-)).

Some people block those ip addreses in a firewall.

The only issue with looking for ip addresses, is that those must be available.

 

The Technical person emailed me this:

For some reason Cakewalk is looking for CloudFront servers on port 80 ... as a last resort it uses 443.   It also tries to connect to a Github port 443.  I'm guessing there's a private Github that Cakewalk is using?

These are always on startup (not in order):

185.199.108.153:443 GitHub
13.225.223.44:443 cloudfront
13.225.210.178:80 cloudfront
108.139.38.10:80 cloudfront
13.92.139.214:80 cloudfront

I've seen this once or twice from Cakewalk:

142.250.80.110:443 Google

Which one of these IP addresses are needed to make Cakewalk startup faster and How long does these connections need to last?

 

[Noel Borthwick]

@El Diablo 2022.11 EA build 21 has improvements for app startup on a network when there is no internet. There should be no delay when starting the application now. Shutdown should also be quicker.