Message boards : Number crunching : Avast antivirus - false positive
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Richard Haselgrove

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Message 27071 - Posted: 21 Jan 2015, 10:48:26 UTC

One of my machines threw four errors this morning. Turned out that Avast had developed an aversion to 'sixtrack_win32_4517_pni.exe' overnight - an application which we've all been using perfectly happily since May last year, and which no other antivirus program finds any fault with.

The problem shows as

Exit status -185 (0xffffffffffffff47) ERR_RESULT_START
couldn't start CreateProcess() failed - The system cannot find the file specified. (0x2): -148

It can be worked round by temporarily disabling Avast's shields while a new copy downloads, and by excluding the BOINC data directory from scanning (Settings - Active protection - File system shield - customise - exclusions, in my copy of Avast Free Antivirus 2015).

This is now the third BOINC project which has suffered from a false positive detection by Avast since I installed this version for testing (the other two are Climate Prediction dot Net and GPUGrid) - in all cases, like this one, a detection on a perfectly good file which has already been in use for an extended period. I'll report it myself, but it's reaching the point where BOINC itself should make a protest.
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Uffe F

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Message 27072 - Posted: 21 Jan 2015, 16:10:03 UTC - in response to Message 27071.  

Have the same problem.

The boinc client stopped downloading tasks because avast was blocking them, causing both my machines to run dry of work.
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Harri Liljeroos
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Message 27073 - Posted: 21 Jan 2015, 18:55:55 UTC
Last modified: 21 Jan 2015, 18:56:48 UTC

Knocking on wood here... but have finished today several WUs with that application and Avast free version running on the system. Currently running four instances of 32 bit pni application and one instance of 64 bit pni application. No problems so far...
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Profile Ray Murray
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Message 27074 - Posted: 21 Jan 2015, 19:14:36 UTC

I lost 6 WUs to this sudden dislike of lhc. WUs in progress completed successfully but these 6 failed to start and no new ones started as the .exe had been removed and download of a replacement was blocked.
In the Exclusions, I put *BOINC* in File Paths and *cern.ch* in URLs. A restart of the host (probably not necessary) and all is well again.
Strange that it all worked before then didn't this morning.
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Uffe F

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Message 27075 - Posted: 21 Jan 2015, 21:00:55 UTC - in response to Message 27074.  

making an exception in avast helped me also. Lost 19 WU's on it though, as I wasn't home all day. Atleast it wont be a problem the next time now :)
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Rainer Voegtlin

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Message 27076 - Posted: 21 Jan 2015, 21:42:41 UTC

13 work units of type "SixTrack v451.07 (pni)" I received on january 20 and 21 were blocked by Avast antivirus software and therefore causing error in computation. If problems like this will go on, I'll report this (hopefully) false positive detection issue to Avast antivirus as soon as possible. But most of the time my computers are crunching different projects unattendedly, so preventing errors is difficult. Exchanging Avast antivirus software is not an option at the moment.
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Stick

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Message 27079 - Posted: 23 Jan 2015, 20:32:06 UTC

I had a few WU's error out as well. Strangely, I have 4 hosts which run LHC and Avast 2015. But I only had the problems with 2 of them. My newer, Win 7 and Win 8.1 hosts were the ones affected. My older Win XP hosts seem to be immune (at least so far) - maybe just coincidence.
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Jesse Viviano

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Message 27099 - Posted: 29 Jan 2015, 15:31:36 UTC - in response to Message 27079.  

Please report the false positive using these instructions on Avast's web site.
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Message boards : Number crunching : Avast antivirus - false positive


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