Plesk Premium Antivirus cannot update: failed to download files

Symptoms

• Plesk Obsidian running on a Linux-based operating system
• Download of updates for the Premium Antivirus for Servers extension for Plesk times out, while logging errors similar to the following in /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog:

  Nov 8 11:02:41 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: request with 380 bytes length was sent to update.geo.drweb.com
  Nov 8 11:02:41 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: update.geo.drweb.com return 404 Not Found
  Nov 8 11:02:41 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: File not found (softfail), will try other variant if any
  Nov 8 11:02:41 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: request with 375 bytes length was sent to update.geo.drweb.com
  Nov 8 11:02:42 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: update.geo.drweb.com return 200 OK
  Nov 8 11:04:11 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: timeout getting response from http://update.geo.drweb.com/plesk/1100/unix/drw11000.vdb
  Nov 8 11:04:11 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: request with 375 bytes length was sent to update.geo.drweb.com
  Nov 8 11:04:11 sv202218138101 update.pl[3737]: update.geo.drweb.com return 200 OK

• Premium Antivirus for Servers (aka Plesk Premium Antivirus) cannot update, the following email notifications are received by the Plesk administrator:

  /etc/cron.daily/drweb-update:
  ERROR: Dr.Web Updater: failed to download files !

• It is possible to reach Dr Web update servers from within the server by executing the following commands:

  # curl -I updates.drweb.com

  # ping updates.drweb.com

• Manual downloads of updates take an unusually long period of time:

  # wget http://update.geo.drweb.com/plesk/1100/unix/drw11000.vdb
  --2023-11-08 09:02:32-- http://update.geo.drweb.com/plesk/1100/unix/drw11000.vdb
  Resolving update.geo.drweb.com (update.geo.drweb.com)... 153.120.15.41
  Connecting to update.geo.drweb.com (update.geo.drweb.com)|153.120.15.41|:80... connected.
  HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
  Length: 18796765 (18M) [application/octet-stream]
  Saving to: 'drw11000.vdb.1'
  drw11000.vdb.1 27%[==============================> ] 4.90M 4.39KB/s eta 38m 48s^

Cause

Networking problem on the side of some Dr.Web servers is preventing their servers from providing adequate downloads speeds to your Plesk server.

Resolution

Switch to the use of another Dr.Web update server by doing the following:

1. Log into your server via SSH
2. Open the /etc/hosts file with your favorite command-line text editor:

3. Add the following entry in the hosts file in order to bind the Dr. Web server with IP address as the one tied to the hostname update.geo.drweb.com:

81.176.67.172 update.geo.drweb.com

Note: In case the entry above does not produce good results in your case (this would generally be based on the location of your Plesk server), you may use one of the following alternatives IPs for Dr.Web update servers:

195.133.219.93
213.59.3.178
195.133.219.91
85.10.234.30
195.161.158.50

As an alternatively workaround, you can increase the maximum network connection timeout value in /etc/drweb/drweb32.ini by opening this file with a command-line text editor and increasing the Timeout = value.

The current timeout limit can be seen by executing the following command:

# egrep -i timeout /etc/drweb/drweb32.ini | tail -n2
# Timeout for updates to be downloaded.
Timeout = 360