Hi pegas,

 

If I understand correctly, this occurred after the most recent update to the software correct? 

 

I would like you perform a few instructions so that we may resolve this issue.

 

Reset scan schedule:

 

1) From the Webroot home page, click Security

2) Select "Antivirus"

3) Press "Schedule"

4)  Choose "Scan Frequency"

5) This will bring up a menu with the scan options. Please choose daily, then reopen and set to weekly.

6) Perform a scan, does this complete?

 

After this has been done, please reply with the results of the scan.  As this is a weekly scan setting, testing this solution will require a tad bit of waiting. 

 

Also, is there any other security software installed on this device, possibly an automatic task killer, or has the device been rooted?  If you have any questions, please let us know!

 

Thanks,

Josh C

 

 

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Hello JoshC!

 

Thanks for your reply. I did exactly what you have described (reset scan schedule) before two weeks but to no avail. Yesterday I have also tried to set daily scans to see how it goes. Unfortunately the scheduled scan wasn't run today. Apart problems with scheduled scans everything worked nicely. Even manual scans went flawlessly. So after those attempts I decided to reinstall application. So we will see ...

 

As regards your other queries, I have a HTC Desire S with Android 2.3.5 and Sense 3.0, no root, no automatic task killer, no other security software installed. My Desire is in its default customer configuration.

 

Any other options?

 

Thanks & Regards,

pegas

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Hi Pegas,

 

In the event that the uninstall and reinstall does not seem to help, please post here again to notify us.  Were scheduled scans working previously?  I know we've assisted you before on the old forum, and I hadn't heard about this from you until just recently.  To confirm, this just recently started happening, correct?

 

The scheduled scan should occur at the same time of day as the installation.  I'd suggest ensuring your device is turned on around that time.

 

- Jim

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Hello Jim!

 

Thx for your reply.

 

I can confirm that the hourly scans do work after reinstallation. So now I set daily scans and I will revert tomorrow with result.

 

You are right that I had posted on the old forum but at the time I had problems with update definitions, i.e. that even if I had set daily update of definitions, updates weren't made. However it seems that 2.3.1336 resolved this problem for me but the problems with scheduled scans occurred instead. Nevertheless as I said I reinstalled the application and at least hourly scans are fine. The daily and weekly scans are still subject to verification.

 

I have noticed a very interesting thing though. It looks like that if I change the scan frequency and then I go back using the Back or Home hardware button on my HTC Desire S instead of button Back in WSA application, the scan option I set is not somehow saved. It might be the reason for the missing scans. I will definitely have confirmed this tomorrow. If tomorrow's scan will go, I am 100% sure then that my assumption was correct.

 

Regards,

pegas

 

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Hi Jim!

 

Quite depressed ... 

 

I waited more than 28 hours since I set daily scan yesterday. Unfortunately the scan didn't run, so I changed the setting back to hourly scans and the scan did run instantly. Then I changed back to daily scans and I am waiting another 24 hours whether the scan show up. It looks like that only hourly scans are fine, daily and weekly scans are missed.

 

Have a question ... I set daily scan today at 10 a.m., in such a case when do you expect the daily scan should run at the latest? Exactly after 24 hours or is there any grace period?

 

I seek for a help , indeed.

 

Thx & regards,

pegas 

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Hello,

 

It should scan at around the same time it was installed.  Now it may be the case that 24 hours will have to have passed initially before that scan initiates.

 

For instance, let's say you installed at 5PM and then changed it to a daily scan at 7PM on the same day.  I would say that rather than wait until 5PM the next day, since 24 hours will not have passed, wait until 5PM the following day to see if it scans then.  I'm not positive on what the formula is for this function, so I think it's prudent to give it that extra time initially for the purposes of investigating the problem.  If you change the scan time repeatedly, that will almost certainly influence the results, so we don't want to do that.  Please let us know the results of that test.

 

I haven't been able to reproduce your issue with the back button on my own device.  I can look into obtaining an HTC Desire S for testing though. 

 

In the event it performs the scan, it's working as designed.

 

In the event it still does not perform the scheduled scan, please reply here.  At that point we may need to obtain a device of the same model to see how we are interacting with it.

 

Thank you,

 

Jim

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Hello Jim!

 

Thx for explanation about counting of time for scheduled scans. You were almost right ... I had reinstalled the application on 29.2.2012 at 8 p.m. After installation I changed the scan frequency from weekly to daily and saved (it took let's say 5 minutes since reinstallation). The first scheduled daily scan run today at 12 p.m., it means that it lasted in fact 40 hours to take the first daily scan. Now I expect that if I won't change the scan frequency, it should be scanning every day at cca 12 p.m. In case it is proved tomorrow I will change the setting to weekly scans and will wait a week to confirm it. I will revert later with result.

 

However one thing is confirmed, I can refute my initial doubts that using hardware buttons may have negative impact on the saved settings. It is equal which buttons are used.

 

Thanks & regards,

pegas 

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Having made a very interesting observation ....

 

WSA mobile premium can't count to 24 😛, at least in my device.

 

As I wrote in my last post the first daily scheduled scan run after 40 hours instead of after 24 hours. OK, no problem especially taking into account Jim's explanation. I have supposed that from this point however, daily scans will occur every day at cca 12 p.m. Unfortunately it turned out that daily scans have been running in fact exactly after 48 hours, please see below URL for a snap from my account. It is obvious that daily scans take place every second day.

 

http://www.mediafire.com/i/?v1nm19i15b1m9qi 

 

It looks like WSA counter skips over 24 hours and initiates daily scans only after 48 hours.

 

Jim, can you kindly check what's going on? Any solution?

 

Please be so kind and remove Solved status for this thread for the time being.

 

Thx & regards,

pegas 

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I have some new information.  As of version 2.3, we now tell Android to schedule the scan at a specific time.  That explains why it's happening at noon for you.

 

If you are playing with your date and time settings on the phone, that could cause this issue to occur.  Are you tinkering with your date and time settings at all?

 

The scheduled scan function is actually delegated to the Android device itself however.  We tell Android to tell us to scan at a set time.  Android itself then has to tell us to initiate the scan.

 

One way we can test this issue a bit quicker than waiting is to purposely set the time forwards.  Before we do this, please ensure your device has been set to Automatic in your Date/Time settings.  If it wasn't set to Automatic all along, try that and see if it helps.  However, if it was already set to Automatic, we can temporarily set it to manual adjustment for the purposes of troubleshooting.  Try setting it for 11:55 AM tomorrow.  Then let the scan run at noon (hopefully it does).  Then set it for 1:00PM the following day.  It will realize it missed a scheduled scan and should initiate it right away.  If both scans are successful, please reply here.  That would merit further consideration.

 

In the event that the subsequent scan fails, I'll need logs from your device to see what happened.  In which case, please open a support ticket here: https://detail.webrootanywhere.com/servicewelcome.asp and I'll send information about how to get logs to us via the support system.  Please put "escalate this to Tier 2 / Jim per his request - pegas" or something to that effect in the body of the support ticket so that I will receive it.

 

Thanks,

 

Jim

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Thx Jim for thorough information 😉 and here's my findings.

 

Firstly, I never played with date and time. The automatic mode is set in default on my device.

 

I exactly followed your instructions regarding changing time and date and the results were just those you have expected.

I changed time to 11:55 and the scan initiated at 12:05 pm, then I changed to the following date and the scan initiated instantly.

 

One thing is strange to me though, how, if not playing with time and date, it is possible the scans were running every second day instead of daily?! 

 

You mentioned if the above steps will prove to be successful, it would be worth of further consideration. So what now?

 

Thanks & regards,

pegas

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So we witnessed the scan visually. Did it reflect both scans on the portal as well?

 

Do you travel on a set schedule and cross the international date line?  If your phone is autosyncing backwards in time, I wonder if that might have something to do with it.  Say for instance you fly between Australia and California on a frequent basis.  You probably would have mentioned that by now if that's the case, but it's worth confirming.

 

If that's not the case, I think it's time to get some logs from the phone at the time of the missed scheduled scan to see what's happening.  I found your email address from prior communications with us, and I'll be sending an email shortly with what to collect and how to go about it.  Let's move this over to our ticketing system for now (due to personal data concerns, log info, etc.), and when we have an answer we'll post it here for posterity as well.

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Just a quick update on this - so far Pegas reports that the issue hasn't yet been observed to reproduce on version 2.6 yet.  If it does, he's going to let me know.

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Just a short feedback ... the daily scheduled scans have successfully run on Saturday and Sunday as well. It is enough to believe that all is fine. The last attempt is to verify weekly scans so I have changed the frequency to weekly and I will wait a week to see how it goes. I will revert with result later. 

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I am pleased to confirm that weekly scan has run exactly after 7 days, ie. on Sunday at 12:09 pm.

 

So Jim's assumption that new build  2.6 has fixed the bug with missing scans was correct :D

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I am glad to hear that! Good job Jim!

 

Pegas, please let us know if you have any more questions. Your feedback on the Community is very much appreciated!

 

 

Mike

Social Online Support Engineer

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I am very sorry to revive this thread again ... :(

 

Yesterday afternoon I did notice the orange exclamation mark with Fix button in WSA. So I followed the FIx and it turned out that a scan wasn't run for more than 7 days (BTW, the scan should have run at 12:09 p.m.). So I run it successfully with a clean result. It means that it missed again weekly scheduled scan. It's really odd. I am completely bemused because the past two weekly scans have run without problem. I should add that nothing has happened on my phone (no updates, installations etc.) for last three weeks. So I don't have even a tiny clue what could cause the scan failure. After that I changed the scan frequency to daily and will wait till today afternoon for a scan. I will revert with result.

 

WSA premier v2.6.0.2217. 

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Hmmm...  This is one of those Good News, Bad News types of things...

 

Scheduled scans work by telling the Android OS itself that it needs to trigger a call in the Webroot App in order to accomplish the scan.  Everything on Android works based on "Have the OS Tell Use When Something Happens" in order to preserve battery life.  When a file is written, the OS tells us and we scan it.  When a scan is scheduled, we file an "Alarm" action with the OS to call us back and scan at that time.

 

It's also possible for the system to believe that a scan was missed if the device shuts down so quickly that it doesn't allow us to save our database.

 

And finally, if the scan last ran at, say, 1:00 am on Monday Morning, then is scheduled to run again at 1:00 am the next Monday morning, but the device is off at that time, the scheduled scan will not be triggered by the OS and in some cases the OS will toss out the scheduled item completely.  So that Monday morning it will show "No scan within 7 days" and the OS will not try to trigger a scan until the following week.

 

So the Good News is that it's not likely "our fault" that the scheduled scan is not occurring.  The Bad News is that means it's more difficult for us to fix.

 

If we schedule an alarm action and the OS loses this for whatever reason (task killers, restart of the phone that doesn't persist the alarm, clean up apps that delete it, bad ROM, permissions blocked, etc), and the OS doesn't call us back to be able to check and see if the action is still there and re-set it if not, it gets to be difficult to say the least.  We can recognize that the scan was missed based on the fact that any call that activates us allows us to see our own database and see when the last scan was run. 

 

I'll tag Jim tomorrow to look into whether we can improve on situations where the Android OS misses activating us and whether we can see about running catch-up code when it tags us for another action.

 

[Edited by Admin: Fixed a mini typo 🙂 ]

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Hello Kit!

 

Thanks for explanation ;)

 

If I correctly understood you, there is a lot of outside OS factors which can affect WSA performace as far as the scheduled scans are concerned.

 

However, in case that WSA relies on a call from Android OS to trigger a scan, it is important I think to incorporate or improve a feedback call which informs back WSA that a scan wasn't run and it will try to trigger a scan again then.

 

Hourly and daily scans are OK in my case. Only intermittent problems with weekly scans. Nevertheless if weekly scan fails it is unacceptable to wait an another week for scanning. In such a case it would be two weeks without scan. There has to be a "b)" scenario which will try to run the missed scan as soon as possible.

 

Please keep us informed.

 

Thanks & regards,

pegas 

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Good news and Bad news on that front. 

 

The bad news is that you understood correctly, which means it's not the best news, which is bad. 

 

The good news is in multiple parts...

 

1: We're already taking a look at how to overcome the OS limitations. Sadly, there are more flavors of Android than of Linux these days, so this is more than just a quick fix.

2: Even without the full scan specifically, anything that is written or executed is scanned as well.  For example:  You download an APK for an app, and this is malicious, but brand new, so it's not detected yet.  You haven't installed it, and a scan would find it if the scan happened after the definition update, but it didn't happen.  However, should you try to install it, it will scan immediately and prior to your ability to accept the installation it will flag it as bad and alert you.  Similarly, if it was installed prior to the definition update, it will scan when you run it.

 

So we've still got you covered, but we know it's not pretty and are working to correct it as best we can.

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Thx Kit. I am at ease now. I really like your posts. They have always pros & cons 😉

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Glad to hear. :)

 

I like to make sure that people have the information they need to either make their own decision on things and also to be able to be comfortable because I provide an understanding of what's going on rather than just "You're safe because we say so."

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