Is there a way to actually force Teams to update?
On one of my Windows VMs I have the Teams desktop client installed. When I look at the version number, it says that 1.3.00.26064 was installed on the 16th of October, but I know a newer version (1.3.00.28779) is available. When I get Teams to do a manual check it says I have the latest version.
If I look at the Teams logs, I can see the URL that it fetches when it checks for updates and when I put that into a browser, it gives me a JSON file that says that yes, version 1.3.00.28779 is available. But in the log it says that no update is available.
So what is going on?
Further investigation:
Checking for updates creates a zero length x64.json file (the same name as the one fetched) in %appdir%\local\roaming\Microsoft\Teams\tmp
Possibilities:
1) something in Teams is caching x64.json way longer than it should.
2) Teams sends additional data with its request (cookies/post info?) which is resulting in the server returning a zero length file when Teams requests it (or possibly a file which shows the current version as the latest) based on some policy - possibly phased rollout?
My evidence for the latter is that there’s mention in the logs of a “staggering” policy and “jitter” values for normal updates and hotfixes and phased rollouts would explain why machines get updated at seemingly random times.
In the end it’s very frustrating that “check for updates” doesn’t actually check for updates - I’m reminded of the way Android used to do phased rollouts where the manual check was effective once a day. Is there a setting to fix this?
It’s a mild security issue because Teams is based on Electron and vendors various libraries which have regular security issues (e.g. FFMPEG, and more recently, one assumes, FreeType) and it’d be nice to force regular (e.g. daily) updates as it’s not clear how exposed these are.
Indeed, there’s an unspecified RCE in Teams in today’s MSRC bulletin and it’s concerning that I can’t roll this fix out if it becomes an issue.
Edit - it just updated itself, so it’s not that the updates are broken, but that the manual check button is basically useless.
submitted by
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