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As of June 2024, WiDeRedist has transitioned into maintenance mode, which indicates that no further features or enhancements will be introduced in the future.
Despite this, the project continues to be actively maintained, with necessary bugfixes, updates and compatibility upgrades provided as needed.
In order to be able to continue using WiDeRedist, at least version 1.2.0 must be installed as all versions below do not work anymore. Nevertheless, installing the latest version is recommended.
The reason why old versions do not work properly (or at all) is actually quite simple.
In those versions the issue lies inside the server-side script file. When running the server-side script, it usually returns that the downloads have been completed successfully if so.
Even though the downloads succeeded, some of the downloaded files are only a few kilobytes in size and therefore useless. The reason why the download is incorrectly considered successful is that wget downloads the wrong file, which succeeds.
Before version 1.2.0, the definition files were downloaded from Microsoft using wget without giving any special arguments which has worked fine. Meanwhile the Microsoft servers do not seem to accept the default wget user agent string (e.g. Wget/1.20.3 (linux-gnu)) anymore.
Instead of returning an HTTP error, the server redirects to a web page which tells that the user agent is missing. Therefore, wget downloads that HTML file instead of any definition file. So, it fetches the wrong file which succeeds and this leads to the incorrect output.
Newer versions of WiDeRedist provide a corresponding user agent string which fixes the problem. If necessary, the string can be modified inside the server-side config file. There also is a file size and MIME type verification of the downloaded files.
However, it is recommended to run either the server-side or client-side script manually once in a while. Since version 1.2.9 both of the scripts return if a newer version is available.
- The project name is an abbreviation for Windows Defender Definition Redistribution (the second and thus repetitive "De" from "Definition" was omitted).
- Furthermore, the word "wide" can also be associated with the network-wide distribution of the definition files.