Salient Soft

1/ I took the latest 2017.1 upgrade when offered by Webstorm. This upgrade results in the following version:-

WebStorm 2017.1.2
Build #WS-171.4249.40, built on April 25, 2017
Licensed to Steve Woodley
You have a perpetual fallback license for this version
Subscription is active until April 9, 2018
JRE: 1.8.0_112-release-736-b21 x86
JVM: OpenJDK Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o
Windows 7 6.1

During the upgrade, Kaspersky complained that E:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\WebStorm 2017.1\jre32\bin\unpack200.exe contained a trojan malware virus. This caused the upgrade to fail.

I checked this online and discovered that Webstorm often gets cited as giving false malware positives, all of which are false. I was happy to allow this to proceed as a Kaspersky exception.

This Kaspersky forum post gives details on what to do (including disabling file antivirus). It then says to add a file exception rule for the file – the instructions for doing this may be found here. Whilst the link is for a 2014 version of Kaspersky, it is similar enough to be correct with the current version as at 2017, with just a few textual prompt/description differences. Note that I added the full file name, but did not enter a value for the file/folder name mask ref the “virus encyclopedia” quoted in the instructions. (I wouldn’t have known what to enter there anyway!). These 2 fields are an either/or – this is not quite made clear in the UI prompts, and is not enforced e.g. via a radio button choice or similar.

Once I did this I checked for updates in Webstorm, retried the new update, and it completed OK.

2/ Having done this, I restarted Webstorm and reloaded my Ionic project. Whilst loading the project, Kaspersky complained that “Server-side JavaScript run by a program with restrictions is attempting to create an embedded key or parameter in a protected registry key”

Effectively, Node.js was attempting to create a new subkey in the registry under TCP/IP Settings (not sure why it would do this, but I was confident that this was not Malware). Whilst Node.js was a trusted program, it was doing  it as instructed via an ionic batch script.

I tried to keep allowing the action but this did not work. The solution in the end came when I noticed that the component hierarchy mentioned in the Kaspersky error consisted of a series of green hyperlinks for each level. I was able to click on the green links, and this immediately took me to a Kaspersky settings screen for that component. I was able to see that the script component calling Node.js did not have permissions to create a security registry key. I was able to easily click on the relevant “?” entries to create a security registry subkey, and set the option to Yes.

So in all a plus for Kaspersky in making it easy to fix, but a minus as I had to work it out for myself and had not been able to find any online or other help on it.

Note for the future – any errors etc. from Kaspersky may have clickable links in them which take you to a place where you can add a rule to stop the error – this is always worth looking into. In my case the clickable links were not underlined but were green in colour.

Once I had done this, restarting Webstorm and opening the project went without any errors from Kaspersky.

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I was unable to access a couchDb from another computer on the local network.

There were 2 issues that needed resolving to address this:-

1/ By default, CouchDb binds to 127.0.0.1:5984, and therefore is only accessible if you use this address (i.e. the loopback adapter) explicitly. Other adapters, such as the lan adapter which has the local ip address, will not work, so you can’t enter the server machine’s own IP address as this won’t work. To fix this, edit local.ini in <couchdb home dir>/etc, and bind to 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1, as  follows:-

[chttpd]
port = 5984
; Options for the MochiWeb HTTP server.
;server_options = [{backlog, 128}, {acceptor_pool_size, 16}]
; For more socket options, consult Erlang’s module ‘inet’ man page.
;socket_options = [{recbuf, 262144}, {sndbuf, 262144}, {nodelay, true}]
bind_address = 0.0.0.0

Note the use of the [chttpd] section in the ini file, not [httpd]

Editing local.ini will override settings in default.ini, and these settings will also be preserved across upgrades, whereas edits to default.ini will not.

This is described in this post here. Note that you can also edit configuration parameters in fauxton in the configuration section. Clicking on the value of a parameter will expose an edit box to allow changes.

Once changes have been made you need to bounce the service.

2/ My other issue was to do with Kaspersky firewall settings. To ensure that you can access a machine from elsewhere on the lan, make sure your network type for the lan adapter is set to trusted and not public. Public will force you to enter explicit rules for every address/application/port etc. that you use, which is a complete pain on a lan. Trusted just allows all machines on the lan to interoperate freely. This is detailed here under how to change the network status.

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