why is mintty trying to connect to google through my browser

why is mintty trying to connect to google through my browser

[LMH]

Hello,

I had an odd thing happen today. I opened a cygwin terminal to do something and got a
firewall alert that mintty was attempting to inject network traffic. I did a
temporary deny because there is no reason for mintty to make a connection based on
what I was doing and I have never seen that alert before (or I would have a firewall
rule already). That alert doesn't say where the connection would be made to if the
injection was allowed.

This temporary block seemed to break my seamonkey connection. My firewall log is full
of entries about blocked connections for seamonkey and the reason given is
"restricted parent process c:\cygwin\bin\mintty". I did not launch seamonkey using
mintty, so I have no idea why the firewall would see mintty as the parent process.
All of the seamonkey attempted connections to my email server were also blocked for
the same reason. When I closed the terminal, everything  went back to normal.

It seems like mintty tried to inject some network traffic to the seamonkey process
and for some reason, blocking this injection caused the firewall to block all traffic
from seamonkey.

Why would mintty try to inject network traffic to another process at startup? If it
needed ot connect for some reason, why would mintty try to make that connection
through another application instead of just making the connection itself?

I deleted any firewall rules for mintty and started the terminal again, but that does
not reproduce the situation at the moment.

I believe this is cygwin 2.3.1.

LMH

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Re: why is mintty trying to connect to google through my browser

[René Berber]

On 10/11/2019 1:33 PM, LMH wrote:

[snip]
> I opened a cygwin terminal to do something and got a
> firewall alert that mintty was attempting to inject network traffic.
[snip]

Perhaps the .bashrc/.bash_profile/etc. script runs something that does that.
-- 
R.Berber


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Re: why is mintty trying to connect to google through my browser

[Thomas Wolff]

Am 11.10.2019 um 20:33 schrieb LMH:
> Hello,
>
> I had an odd thing happen today. I opened a cygwin terminal to do something and got a
> firewall alert that mintty was attempting to inject network traffic. I did a
> temporary deny because there is no reason for mintty to make a connection based on
> what I was doing and I have never seen that alert before (or I would have a firewall
> rule already). That alert doesn't say where the connection would be made to if the
> injection was allowed.
>
> This temporary block seemed to break my seamonkey connection. My firewall log is full
> of entries about blocked connections for seamonkey and the reason given is
> "restricted parent process c:\cygwin\bin\mintty". I did not launch seamonkey using
> mintty, so I have no idea why the firewall would see mintty as the parent process.
> All of the seamonkey attempted connections to my email server were also blocked for
> the same reason. When I closed the terminal, everything  went back to normal.
>
> It seems like mintty tried to inject some network traffic to the seamonkey process
> and for some reason, blocking this injection caused the firewall to block all traffic
> from seamonkey.
>
> Why would mintty try to inject network traffic to another process at startup? If it
> needed ot connect for some reason, why would mintty try to make that connection
> through another application instead of just making the connection itself?
It does neither of that. Mintty only ever accesses the network if you 
open the Options dialog.
It occasionally looks up the current mintty version for an indication 
that you could update (disable with CheckVersionUpdate=0), and it 
downloads contents if you drag a URL onto the Theme configuration field 
(also planned for the Bell Wave file) or click on the "Color Scheme 
Designer" button.
> I deleted any firewall rules for mintty and started the terminal again, but that does
> not reproduce the situation at the moment.
This, and the fact that your system claimed mintty to be the parent of 
Seamonkey, suggests that something is or was utterly broken on your system.

Thomas

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