(Note: the following discussion assumes that your SSW installation is located in C:\ssw.)

It is important to update your SSW installation on a regular basis.

During the creation of the SSW installation script, you had an opportunity to select "Enable daily upgrade task".  If you enabled that option, the C:\ssw\site\setup\Daily.bat script is scheduled to run automatically every night.  (By opening a DOS command window, and typing the word 'at', you can see that it is scheduled.)

If you didn't schedule automatic updates, or if you want to force an update manually, you can double click the Daily.bat file anytime.  Or - even more convenient - you can create a shortcut on your Desktop to the Daily.bat file and double click the desktop icon any time to update SSW. 

If you didn't set up automatic updates during the installation, but would like to start them later, open a DOS window and type something like:

at  03:50  /every:su,m,t,w,th,f,sa  C:\ssw\site\setup\daily.bat

(adjusting the time to your preference and the location of the daily.bat file to your machine's ssw location).  You can check what has been set with the 'at' command by simply typing at (the word 'at') in the DOS window.

Normally, when the Daily.bat script runs it opens a DOS window that shows the initial update command, but nothing more.  This window will close after the update completes.  Normally a log file is created in your site/setup directory.  Look in the Daily.bat file to see or change the name of the log file.  You can examine this log file to see what happened during the update.

You can kill the update job any time by closing the DOS window.  Updates are cumulative, so the next update will pick up where this one stopped.

If you would like to see the text that gets sent to the log file in the DOS window (it will still also get sent to the log file), do the following:

1. Install the tee.exe program in your site/setup directory by opening http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~bfriesen/software/console.shtml, scrolling down to the Tee section, and downloading the 32-bit version of Tee to your desktop (it is a zip file).  Open the zip file and extract tee.exe to your site/setup directory.
2. Edit your Daily.bat script by changing the line that runs mirror and currently looks similar to:

   C:\perl\bin\perl.exe C:\ssw\gen\mirror\mirror.pl -d C:\ssw\site\setup\ssw_install.pkg > C:\ssw\site\setup\daily.log

   to look similar to this:

   C:\perl\bin\perl.exe C:\ssw\gen\mirror\mirror.pl -d C:\ssw\site\setup\ssw_install.pkg | C:\ssw\site\setup\tee  C:\ssw\site\setup\daily.log

Notes:  Even if the command wraps on this page, it is entered as one line in your Daily.bat file.  This example assumes that your ssw installation is in C:ssw and your perl installation is in C:\perl. 

 

  Restart your virus scanning software if applicable.

 

This site last updated December 5th, 2006.