This may or may not be something you are familiar with.

I've been cranking out a fairly large number of Perl scripts.
It was getting pretty hard to keep track of what worked, why I started a new rev and so on.
I decided to install CVS and since I'm still (mostly) on a windows box, I also installed CVSNT, from March-Hare.

The installation went alright, and I set up a repository.

Now for whats bothering me.
I have ZoneAlarm installed and it tells me the program is going out to 216.120.246.131 when I use it, which resolves to host60.hrwebservices.net.
I searched around on the March-Hare Wiki and looked through the faq's but I didn't find anything helpfull.

Why in the world should this be occuring? I suspect it's a way of tracking usage, but don't really know.

I do know I don't like it. I block virtually everything going out from my box as a potential security risk. (Love Window$ security, don't we all?)

Any help will be appreciated.

Roy.



The following possibilities strike me:

a) It could be a licensing check to ensure that there's only one copy of the software yo purchased installed and in use

b) It could be that the software is checking for updates

c) Does the software offer syncronisation between different hosts / sites?  If you, it could relate to that

d) Does the software offer centralised backups?  If so, it could relate to that

Even if you're not using facilities suhc as (c) and (d) but they do exist, it's possible that the code has been written in such a way that any / your installation flags "there's a single host system running here" from time to time.

Most of the above explanations are relatively innocent ... I very much doubt that there's anything sinister like them grabbing illicit copies of your code.   If you're concerned, drop them an email and ask.

Thanks for the reply Graham.

Those are certainly possibilities. The software is all open source, so I don't believe there were license checks going out.
I found that it was going out to a variety of places.
69.225.175.97, 69.225.175.90, and several variatione, along with 224.0.0.251 and 216.120.246.131.
It's troubling enough that after a couple of hours of clicking "ok" each time I did something I decided enough was enough and un-installed the whole mess. I don't think anyone was grabbing copies of the code either, but it bothered me too much.
I'm evaluating some other packages and haven't had anything simular occurring.

I am certainly enjoying Perl, however. It's a marvelous language.

Roy.

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