Kaspersky - is it the worst security suite?

I recently upgraded to windows 8 after a series of problems I had with windows 7, which started when I uninstalled Kaspersky Internet Secuirty 2012 to upgrade to KIS 2014.

After the upgrade, most of the USB devices I connected were not recognized (luckily the wired mouse and keyboard did keep working). Quite a few people experienced this and there's some registry voodoo to fix this. Unfortunately the fix didn't work, and since I had to reinstall windows to fix this, I decided to upgrade to win 8.1.

After I installed Win8 I had yet another 2 issues. The first one with VMWare Workstation. For some reason, VMWS wasn't able to create a bridged connection (most of my VMs use this rather than NAT)... going through the Kaspersky Forums, a few people recommended in this case to uninstall KIS, create the network bridge, reinstall KIS. What a PITA, but it did work.

So now I have everything ready to start coding? Not really. Some encrypted connections kept dying on me (something as simple as a git pull from a tiny github repo would take 10 minutes and end up in a connection failure). Pausing the protection didn't help, so I went through the pain of uninstalling KIS, trying, reinstalling KIS just to prove that the problem was KIS (rather than a dodgy router). Finally I found that KIS 2015 has a feature to snoop on all encrypted connections and that was affecting the connection. So I had to go to settings -> additional -> Network -> uncheck Scan encrypted connections.

I'm quite sure that companies providing security suites are having more and more trouble to provide working, compatible software, as malware becomes more advanced, the number of consumer applications multiply, and the incompatibility matrix becomes a 1000000000x1000000000 minesweeper game with half of the cells with bombs which move around.

I think at some point I'm going to install Sophos UTM and see how that goes...

Squid on cygwin "Unable to determine IP address from host name"

I recently started using vagrant+docker which meant that I started downloading a lot of RPMs, docker images and vagrant boxes.

To reduce the amount of time I spend waiting for packages to be downloaded, I set up squid on cygwin. The set up wasn't too complicated, but I got stuck with something. Squid reads /etc/resov.conf to find out which nameserver to use... and cygwin doesn't create (nor need) this file. This mean that I spend 1 hour trying to figure out why squid wasn't able to resolve names. This is part of the html Squid generated to report the error.

The following error was encountered while trying to retrieve the URL: http://google.com/

     Unable to determine IP address from host name "google.com"

So if you want to run squid on cygwin, don't forget to create a /etc/resolv.conf file similar to the following one

search local
nameserver 8.8.8.8

I chose to use google's DNS (8.8.8.8) for the time being, but the best solution would be to run a script when I launch cygwin that creates/updates the resolv.conf file with my current DNS... but I have no idea at the moment how to get this data from windows.

Error updating / installing cygwin

Cygwin recently started to provide different binaries for windows 32 and 64 bits (the previous version was 32 bit only). As part of this change, they've changed the layout of the update repositories, so if you have an old setup.exe binary, you might get one of the following errors when you select from which mirror to download the packages

• Unable to get setup.ini from <ulr>

 or the more cryptic

• Internal error: gcrypt library error 60 illegal tag.

The way to fix this is simple, just download one of the new flavours of setup_<arch>.exe from cygwin. If you download the 64 bit version I suggested you to install it in a different location or delete your previous version, but do not override a 32 bit version with a 64 bit version.

Cygwin: How to paste with a right click

For the last few weeks, I've been scratching my head because I could paste content into cygwin with a right click on my work computer, but I couldn't do it at home. And more annoyingly, I couldn't figure it out until a few minutes ago.

To enable paste with a right mouse click, follow these steps (written for dummies like me)

1) Open the cygwin options (aka preferences or settings)

2) Select mouse in the left menu, and select Paste under Right click action

And since the last few versions of cygwin supports windows resize, it has the same good features as putty :).

Git error about missing ca-bundle.crt on Cygwin

If you get the following error:

$ git push -u origin master
error: error setting certificate verify locations:
  CAfile: /usr/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
   [...]

when pushing, cloning, or any other operation that requires https access, the problem is that cygwin hasn't installed the ca-certificates package. Run the cygwin installer again, and add that package; after that git should start working.