Revive Adserver is an open source project, dedicated to building and supporting the open source ad server software and the community of users around the world.

As with any software, it is important to keep your ad server system’s software up to date with the most recent release.

Where to find Update information

Where to find the Product Updates in Revive Adserver

Where to find the Product Updates information in Revive Adserver

The Revive Adserver software has a useful built-in update notification feature, which helps system administrators stay up to date about the latest release of our software.

It can be found by logging in as a administrator, switching to “Working as System Administrator” in the top right hand corner drop down, and then selecting the Configuration tab, followed by clicking the Product Updates link in the left hand menu.

The system will then contact to the central Sync server operated by the Revive Adserver project, which returns a message about the latest version available. Your Revive Adserver installation will also perform this update check automatically at midnight every night, and it will inform the administrator user when they log in the next time, if there is an update available.

Update check failing in some edge cases

During this midnight update check, the Sync server keeps a count of all the active installations of Revive Adserver around the world. Starting in the last quarter of 2015, we started to notice a slow down in the growth of the number of active installations. We’ve been checking this, and recently it was discovered that this is caused by the combination of an update of PHP on some servers and a bug in Revive Adserver itself. As a result, some installations of Revive Adserver are no longer able to create a working connection with the Sync server.

A check for updates failed

A check for updates failed (click to enlarge)

You can check if your installation is affected, by going to the Product Updates page as described above. If the issue occurs on your server, you will see a message saying “Communication with the update server timed out, so Revive Adserver is not able to check if a new version is available at this stage“.

This bug in Revive Adserver has now been fixed (see the Github issue which also links to the code change). The fix will be part of the upcoming v3.2.3 release of the software. However, if your installation is affected by this bug, you won’t see the update notifications, obviously.

How to stay informed about new versions

To stay informed about our releases, you can do a number of things: