I/O Error

Hi, Martin. I am glad you did not forget about me. Ric at Adobe has been e-mailing me. He is currently stumped and claims that the error is very generic. He asked that I send the Save As from System Profiler from the Mac that works and the Mac that is acting up. That was 10 days ago and I have not heard back yet.

I ran out of ideas at that point. I even tried to go back a version of Adobe Reader. Even if you install 6.0 or 7.0 when you click on an ebook it now down loads the new ADE.

I have a few ports open of iChat on the computers that work, so I opened them on the "bad" Mac. That did not work.

From there I gave up. Not the solution, but ....

Adobe is aware. What they are doing I am unsure.

I would ask a few questions of you:

Are your customers with the troubles using Intel Core 2 Duo machines? What system are they using? Are they downloading with Safari? Wireless vs. ethernet? Firewall?

I would be willing to put together a table of similarities and "dis similarities" for the computers that are acting up. Maybe something will jump out at us.

Let me know what we should put on that list if you are willing.

I will say that the "bad" mac spends a lot of time on iTunes and uses a program called lastfm. I do not know why that would matter especially since I quit those before I try and run ADE.

Sorry for the rambling,

Keep in touch,

Debbie

Debbie,

Were you able to solve the problem?

If you were, what did the trick? I'm still getting support requests from customers with the same error and I still have no definitive answer to give them.

Martin

Ric,

First of all, thanks for responding!

Indeed, it was my customer who had AVG Free but then so have I on my laptop and I have no problems downloading ebooks with DE (that is, once I changed my user name to one with no Danish characters!). I have not changed any permissions for DE or Flash Player manually.

Are you saying the user in some cases has to manually configure the virus checker and/or firewall to specifically allow access to Flash Player and/or DE? I second Debbie's request for info on which ports need to be open, if that is the case. In AR7 you sometimes needed to grant specific access to the activation server at aractivate.adobe.com. Is something similar the case with DE?

If so, we'll update our FAQ and support info.

Martin

Hey, Ric. We are on a Mac and do not have any firewalls or virus software running.

It seems odd that I can download DE and Reader and not get the free ebooks.

I will dig deeper into any other settings.

Do I need to open any specific ports for the Flash player? We opened ports for things like iChat.

thanks for any and all suggestions.

Debbie

I think there are two different problems in this thread, though they appear to be manifested the same way. The error 2038 is the generic error the Flash player (which underlies DE) throws when it gets a network error. Basically, DE made a request with a URL and got an error back. Most common reason for this is a firewall or virus checker has blocked the call. We have seen cases where the user (or a friend or some other person) configured their virus checker or firewall to allow Acrobat/Reader access but when they upgraded to DE they did not make this change. Could this be the case here?

I note that one of the posters has AVG Free, which is a virus-checker.

Ric, DE Team

Martin,

Great minds must think alike. As a last resort I downloaded Adobe Reader 7.0 yesterday on the troubled machine and attempted to perform the DRM named authorization at the Adobe website. That led to more errors.

Could not create an EDB database: specified database path is invalied or cannot be accessed.

More digging suggested it was a permissions issue. I ran disk utility to fix the permissions. No luck. I also found that Adobe wants you to use the new DE even if you are running Reader 7.

On another note. I found some posts by Ric and sent an e-mail. It was actually my second. I have had no responses from Adobe.

I am convinced that that I need to do a clean uninstall of both DE and Reader 8. Then re install Reader first then DE.

The no voucher folder still puzzles me and I believe that is the crux of what is going on.

The named activation server at Adobe has been down for a while.

What a mess.

Thank you very much for all of your suggestions. I will continue to post as I learn more.

Debbie

Debbie,

Did you try named activation? I know it's a long shot but it may reveal whether or not your Mac is able to connect to the Adobe activation server.

Regarding the browser, the system requirements (www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/systemreqs)state that only two browsers are supported: Apple Safari 2.0.4, Mozilla FireFox 2. Why other Mac browsers wouldn't work with DE, I have no idea. I'm not a programmer, unfortunately, just a Danish Project Manager in charge of supporting Danish ebook customers :-)

I know Adobe reads this forum. Ric Wright and lead architect Peter Sorotokin also posts here occasionally.

I'm guessing there is no straightforward solution or they would have posted it already. I suggest you summarize the problem and our attempts to solve it and send an email to Adobe. You may experience better luck than I have had recently in my attempts to obtain answers from Adobe to our questions on Digital Editions.

Martin

Martin,

One more comment. I uninstalled Adobe Reader 8.1 on the troubled machine and reinstalled it. Still did not work.

I am convinced the issue resides with the fact that a voucher folder does not exist on the troubled machine. I am sure this has something to do with authentication or registration.

I look forward to any other suggestions.

Debbie

Martin,

I would normally not disagree with you on moving back one version of Safari, but I tried Firefox and Opera as well and neither of those worked either. I do believe that Adobe needs to consider what is happening and offer a suggestion or two. As this means of text book becomes more popular, the program needs to work more successfully.

Debbie

I still think a downgrade of Safari 3.0.3 to 2.0.4 would be worth a shot if it's not too inconvenient. It seems to be the only significant difference between the Mac I used successfully and the Mac with the problem.

I believe DE activates like Adobe Reader 7. I think the software uses a kind of "snapshot" of the computer's hardware among other things to obtain some form of unique identification when downloading an ebook. When downloading the first ebook the ebook reader then contacts the activation server at Adobe with this information and activates the computer. In the days of Adobe Reader 6.0.0 you actually had to perform a manual, named activation.

The old named activation method required for Adobe Reader 7 and 6 is still available from here: https://aractivate.adobe.com - you'll need a Windows Live ID to activate: https://accountservices.passport.net/ppnetworkhome.srf?lc=1000.

I have absolutely no idea if this will work with DE, but it's a form of activation.

As far as I know, DE can run without Reader 8 or any other Reader present.