Life In 19x19

Since it has been said that guest logins are an option and somebody informed me about checksums, I have tried to register and install WBaduk. This is my experience under Windows 7 Professional 64b German:

1) The registration on the WBaduk webpage failed.

2) The administrators, whom one is supposed to contact in case of (1), of the WBaduk webpage have not replied to my email for more than 5 days now.

3) The installer WBaduk_20140410A.exe has the MD5 15148b672edb3393ae947b01672e57ab and the SHA1 5a045100df9e4e2f4b9aacaac2946e85e61031bf .

4) As good practise before installation, I created a Windows Restore Point and recalculated the system and programs checksums.

5) Execution of WBaduk_20140410A.exe created this error message: "Setup failed to launch installation engine: Dieses Programm wurde durch eine Gruppenrichtlinie geblockt. Wenden Sie sich an den Systemadministrator, um weitere Informationen zu erhalten." Note: during execution, the installer was not restricted by software restriction policies; I cannot know which other group policy might have been violated.

6) Manual extraction of WBaduk_20140410A.exe created a couple of files including Setup.exe, IKernel.ex_, data1.cab, data2.cab.

7) Manual start of Setup.exe created one of the following errors: "Error installing iKernel.exe (0x10000)" or ""Error installing iKernel.exe (0x2400)".

8) Various attempts to manually expand the CAB files failed.

9) A checksum analysis revealed that, before crashing, the Setup.exe behaved as malware: it deleted, without prior consent, the file C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\InstallShield\engine\6\Intel 32\IKernel.exe that had been on my PC before the start of the installation attempt. Therefore, I called the Windows Restore Point, restored everything including the file, recalculated checksums and so verified that the original file was restored indeed.

10) An inspection of C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\InstallShield\engine\6\Intel 32\IKernel.exe revealed that it is of InstallShield Software Corporation, as it should be. The WBaduk extracted IKernel.ex_ does not declare the issuing entity.

Comments:
- The WBaduk installer is the worst installer I have ever seen. I saw crashing installers, but WBaduk is worse: it also acts as malware when deleting other programs' file without asking.
- Apparently the WBaduk installer would have wanted to replace the existing IKernel.exe with a proprietary IKernel.exe in order to proceed with the installation process, however, some programming bug let the installer fail.
- Programmers unable to program installers ought to provide their program files for manual installation or not at all.
- A go server with insufficient support and failing software provides perfect reasons not to use it.
- As others have reported elsewhere, a successfully installed WBaduk client software shows other nasty bugs.

You might be interested in trying WBaduk through their Java applet. It's not super reliable, but if you just want to observe games and want to avoid the installer, then it will do in a pinch.

http://www.wbaduk.com/include/play_now_view.asp?mode=2

Or if you have an Android phone/tablet the app.

Robert Jasiek wrote:A go server with insufficient support and failing software provides perfect reasons not to use it.

Yes, the wbaduk and tygem clients are kind of crappy, however, I'm pretty sure you're in the minority with the above statement.

I just quickly checked and we have the following statistics. There are currently:

1000 users on KGS (1 server)
11000 users on wbaduk (spread over 6 servers)
19000 users on tygem (spread over 8 servers)

So no matter how strong you are, you basically will always get a game very quickly.
Additionally, most pros that play online play either on tygem or wbaduk.

Dealing with crappy Windows-only clients is a small price to pay for all of that, IMHO.

As for your problems: if you just want to observe games, you could also consider using qgo, see this thread.
Even though it should be technically possible to compile that under Windows, I somehow doubt you'll want to do that. So you could for example run a linux vm and use qgo inside that. Surely that's secure enough..
Or, you know, you could just install Windows in a vm and then install wbaduk there, as has been suggested before. (And no, you haven't actually given a single coherent argument as to why you reject this solution in that "Virtual Machine" thread.)

When I have a program that seems to fail during install or after install I set program to run as administrator. Seems to always work. Worth a shot at any rate.

I did start it as administrator.

leichtloeslich wrote: I just quickly checked and we have the following statistics. There are currently:

1000 users on KGS (1 server)
11000 users on wbaduk (spread over 6 servers)
19000 users on tygem (spread over 8 servers)

To be fair, few of the wbaduk or tygem users use the English clients which are significantly worse than the Asian clients.

RobertJasiek wrote:As others have reported elsewhere, a successfully installed WBaduk client software shows other nasty bugs.

I had quite some problems with crashes until I found the hint to deactivate all flash animations in the client. For this, you have to go into the "Setting" menu and then into the "Flash" register card. You have to activate all off the boxes to turn the flash animations off (I like GUI designs forcing you to read all of the text carefully before clicking... ). From that setting on, I did not encounter any more crashes in the client, while I have to agree that the installer feels somehow suspicious... Further, I am wondering which kind of great flash animations I am missing now