[GRASS-dev] McAfee Security Center 7.2 breaks mon.select

[Glynn Clements]

cheg01 at comcast.net wrote:

> I am running grass 6.2.1 on Cygwin/Windows XP. Everything was fine
> while I was running Norton Antivirus but ithen I installed the newest
> McAfee security suite and 'd.mon' stopped working. 'mon.start' works
> to create the window but XDRIVER.exe hangs on 'mon.select' and will
> not accept connections. I get the following error message:
> 
> Socket is already in use or not accepting connections
> Use d.mon to select a monitor
> Problem selecting x0
> 
> The mon window cannot be closed until the parent window is closed. 
> Same thing happens on Grass 5.4. Any suggestions? Can anyone give me a
> brief description of how the monitor socket creation and selection
> works so I can take this up with McAfee? I thought it might be using
> some specific ports that are blocked but I don't know where to start.

Display modules connect to a monitor via a Unix-domain (AF_UNIX)
socket in the session directory (/tmp/grass6-<user>-pid in 6.x).

Windows doesn't have Unix-domain sockets, so Cygwin emulates them
using TCP sockets, with arbitrarily-chosen port numbers.

Firewall software can interfere with this; e.g. Zone Alarm will
display a confirmation dialog for XDRIVER and for each program which
tries to connect to it. When you start a monitor with "d.mon start=",
the first client will be mon.select (unless you use -s).

If you're having problems with mon.select, it's likely that other d.*
programs will have the same problems.

Also, some security software may not like Cygwin, as it does "odd"
stuff to emulate Unix fork/exec, some of which might be considered
suspicious.

However, searching on the Cygwin mailing list tends to come up with
lots of references to McAfee, usually in close proximity to phrases
such as "buggy device driver". At least, there are enough hits with
generic "ensure that you don't have McAfee installed" advice that it's
likely to be a lot of effort to hunt through them all in order to find
out what the exact problems are.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>