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McAfee Privacy Service breaks CygWin subversion, badly

From: Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel_at_comcast.net>
Date: 2006-08-22 11:36:15 CEST

Comcast provides a subscription to the "McAfee Security Center". I've just
started using it. It's a nice tool overall, but ye ghods, it breaks
subversion.

If you use the CygWin sshd, the included McAfee Privacy Service, which
blocks pop-ups and adware and from its behavior includes McAfee's old
"Buffer Overflow Protection" from earlier software, screws up sshd, wget,
and svn. For sshd, it prevents the daemon from re-exec;ing. Turning off the
Privacy Service, or killing the active McAfee processes, is not sufficient
to allow sshd to run normally. The Privacy Service has to actually be
deleted from the Control Panel.

This sshd problem can be worked around by changing the daemon's options to
add the undocumented "do not re-exec" option, "-r". I've attached a modified
copy of ssh-host-config that can be used to set up the SSH daemon on such a
system, so that anyone who installs McAfee Security Center on a Windows
server for Subversion can continue to operate sshd as part of ssh+svnserve
setups.

Unfortunately, it also breaks wget and svn. Both complain about "PROPFIND"
responses: the only fix is to remove the Privacy Service. I've contacted
McAfee about the problem. I hope they can fix this, because this sort of
booby trap impairs deployment of tools like CygWin, and CygWin as a way to
do development with gcc and subversion.

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Received on Tue Aug 22 11:38:17 2006

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