Can't download spost13_ado

[Carolina Vargas]

Hello stata friends,

I'm trying to download spost13_ado so I can run mlogtest but there seems to be an issue (pic below). Is this happening to others? Is there a way to download it from here: https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/stata/?

Thank you all!

[William Lisowski]

I successfully installed it by starting, as the installation instructions at https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/web_s...13_install.htm recommend, with

search spost13_ado

and in the Viewer window that opened saw

...
spost13_ado from https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/stata
    Distribution-date: 05Apr2019 / spost13_ado | SPost13 commands from Long
    and Freese (2014) / Regression Models for Categorical Outcomes using
    Stata, 3rd Edition. / Support www.indiana.edu/~jslsoc/spost.htm / Scott
    Long ([email protected]) & Jeremy Freese ([email protected])
...

I clicked on "spost13_ado" and in the Viewer window now saw

...
INSTALLATION FILES                                  (click here to install)
      spost13_ado/xmchange.ado
      spost13_ado/mnlcom.ado
      spost13_ado/mgenl.ado
...

I clicked on "click here to install" and it was successfully installed.

The current net commands in question are

net describe spost13_ado.pkg, from(https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/stata)
net install spost13_ado.pkg, from(https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/stata)

but it is always better to start with Stata's search command to avoid problems like those reported here.

[Carolina Vargas]

William I tried that and this but this is what happened when I clicked, is there another way?

[William Lisowski]

What version of Stata are you running?

[Richard Williams]

William Lisowski , I was going to ask the same thing, but then I noticed that the first screen shot says Stata/MP 13.0

Carolina Vargas Not only is your version of Stata old, it it unnecessarily old. You should update to Stata 13.1. Maybe 13 had a bug that was fixed in 13.1. Type

update all

If it won't let you update, you may not have sufficient read/write privileges to your machine and you will need some IT person with superhuman powers to do the update.

Other thoughts: Being old-fashioned, I use the antiquated but still working command

findit spost13_ado

Notice that, unlike you, I do not tack on .pkg at the end. If I do, Stata can't find anything.

A lot of times when I get errors like yours, I just try again later. Often there is a temporary network problem on one end or the other that soon goes away.

If still no luck -- are you able to install any programs, e.g. from SSC? If not, your network or firewall may be blocking you. See

help netio

Again, you might have to consult some local tech person to figure how to work around the problem.

A few other general comments:

• If you don't have the most current version of Stata then you should say what you do have. This is especially true when you have a hopelessly outdated version like 13. (If someone buys the software for you, you should tell them that you cannot possibly be expected to work under such primitive subhuman conditions and they should get you an update. You may be struggling with a problem that was fixed 5 years ago in a later version of Stata.)
• Posting images is discouraged, especially when it is unnecessary. Use code tags instead. See the Statalist FAQ

The fact that your version of Stata is unnecessarily old and you are having these installation issues makes me suspect that you are at the mercy of some IT person to keep your machine up to date. When working in classrooms and labs I sometimes have such problems myself. But hopefully you can fix things yourself; or, if it is a temporary network problem, it may just go away by itself.

[Nick Cox]

I think Stata 13 didn’t support https, only http.

[Richard Williams]

Also, here are some suggestions I wrote for working with machines you don't control, e.g. a computer lab. Alas, these instructions don't work at Notre Dame anymore, but something similar might work at other places. In particular it shows how you can install user-written commands when you don't have write permission on your machine. But if so, you still need some tech person with superhuman powers to update Stata itself.

https://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statsi...a/ndstata.html

I don't mention this, but instead of a network drive you could also use a USB drive that you carried around with you.

[Richard Williams]

I think Stata 13 didn’t support https, only http.

Good point. I don't remember when things changed, but Stata did not always support https. It created havoc when Notre Dame switched my web pages to https and I had to modify dozens if not 100s of handouts and examples to use https instead of http. My tech people thought I was crazy to complain about this because, if you type in http in a browser, it automatically changes it to https if necessary. But, for security reasons, Stata commands will not do that. Which, of course, is even more problematic if you have an older version of Stata that doesn't allow https.

Assuming Nick is right about version 13, that is all the more reason to upgrade to a newer version of Stata. Otherwise you may have to go through a painful process of downloading files individually and then putting them in the right folders.

Incidentally, I just checked, and both Stata Journal and SSC use http, not https. If they used https instead then people with older versions of Stata would have a lot of problems getting user-written programs. But spost13 is on a university site that uses https, and the authors of the programs (Scott Long and Jeremy Freese) probably couldn't change that even if they wanted to.

[Richard Williams]

However https doesn't seem to be the problem in this case. If you type

help whatsnew12to13

You can find

16. Stata now supports secure HTTP (HTTPS) and FTP. You can, for instance, use datasets from sites using either of the protocols. See [U] 3.5 Updating and adding features from the web.

That doesn't mean there wasn't a bug somewhere. The first thing I would do is update to 13.1. You would want to do this even if you weren't getting the current errors.

[Nick Cox]

Richard is right. https://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatsnew13 cites various bug fixes in the life of Stata 13.

[William Lisowski]

Sorry to be late to return to this party.

TL;DR: Even with a fully updated copy of Stata 13, configuration choices at Indiana may still cause installation of spost13_ado to fail with symptoms like those reported in post #1 above. I have seen this happen before and describe the problem in detail below.

Carolina Vargas - I agree with the advice of Richard and Nick to update your copy of Stata 13 to the latest version. This assumes you are running Stata on a computer to which you have administrator rights. If so,

update all

should at no cost to you update your copy of Stata13 to the latest update level available. Please let us know if that resolves your problems, or if you are unable to install the update. The process of downloading the components of spost13_ado using a web browser and placing them into appropriate directories on your system will likely be painful, because there are a lot of pieces and it's not immediately obvious which ones are needed for what you want to do.

Details details details ...

The point to what follows is that all https is not created equal, and through 18 April 2015 limitations on Stata's https support prevented it from connecting to sites enforcing a more stringent, but still quite widespread, level of encryption than that which Stata supported.

My initial thought when I wrote post #4 was that the version of Stata being run did not support https. (I was posting from a device that made the screenshot useless.) But with the knowledge that it was Stata 13 help whatsnew12to13 tells us "Stata now supports secure HTTP (HTTPS) and FTP."

Many sites requiring https also require AES256 (256-bit) encryption, including that of a friend who had a self-hosted Stata net site akin to that at Indiana. Stata's network connectivity is provided by Stata's Java Runtime Environment. Until Stata 15.1, the Stata JRE supported https with no better than AES128 (128-bit) encryption (or perhaps it supported an inadequate implementation of AES256.)

The failure mode at my friend's site was - I believe - identical to the failure mode at Indiana documented in posts #1 and #3. The technical term is that the handshake between Stata and the server failed - they couldn't agree on a common encryption protocol.

This problem was remedied in the Stata update of 18 April 2015 (applied to Stata 15.1 which came out earlier). In help whatsnew15 we have "The Java Runtime Environment that is redistributed with Stata is now updated to version 8 update162." That JRE supported AES256 in such a manner that the problems on my friend's site disappeared.

So it is possible that even with updating the Stata 13 release to the latest version available, configuration choices at Indiana will not allow Stata 13.1 to successfully perform the operations described in my post #2 above. I think Indiana supports some version of AES128, but I'm not certain if all implementations are created equal and the implementation used by Stata 13 will meet the needs of Indiana's server.

I agree with Richard that Scott Long is unlikely to be able to affect Indiana's configuration of his site. But perhaps Long and Freese would now be amenable to making spost13_ado available through SSC, which appears to have control over its configuration and continued support for http outside of whatever norms are established more generally by BU. Certainly spost9_ado can no longer conveniently be installed by the (presumably very small) target audience. :-)

[Carolina Vargas]

Thank you all!!" This solved the issue!!

[Richard Williams]

Glad you solved the problem. But what suggestion actually worked? Knowing what it was might help some other future user who finds this thread.

[Carolina Vargas]

So I used what William Lisowski had said and I ran

update all

following this I was able to download normally!

Thanks to all!

[MarcusLBritton]

I've run into the same problem, even though I'm using a more recent version of Stata (i.e., version 16.1). I used these commands:

net search spost13_ado
net describe spost13_ado, from(https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/stata)

and got the same error message with a list of three possibilities that Carolina Vargas received in her opening post (i.e., not a valid URL, could not be contacted, or is not a Stata download site [has no stata.toc file]). My guess (and it's only a guess) is that, now that J. Scott Long is retired, IU has taken down his site (?). This has fairly immediate implications for my own graduate teaching, since if it's no longer possible for my students to access the SPost package, I'm not sure it still makes sense to use Long and Freese's (2014) text (i.e., Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata) as the main text for the course I'll be teaching on such models this fall.