Unable to log into Bash - bash: fork: retry: resource temporarily unavailable

Products

• CA Spectrum
• DX NetOps

Issue/Introduction

We stopped getting alarms forwarded by Alarm Notifier and its affecting our SLOs in a big way. In trying to troubleshoot the ticketing issue, we notice that we are unable to log into Bash. 

We also notice in our NOTIFIER.OUT log that Alarm Notifier scripts are not running, as they use Bash and getting the same errors in NOTIFIER.OUT log: 

"bash: fork: retry: resource temporarily unavailable" 

Environment

Release: All Supported Releases

Windows Operating System

Cause

Root Cause: Anti Virus is blocking Bash.exe - sees this executable as a potential threat

 

Resolution

Add bash.exe in Anti-Virus exclusion rules: \win32app\Spectrum\NT-Tools\SRE\bin\bash.exe

Also add sh.exe to exclusion rules: \win32app\Spectrum\NT-Tools\SRE\bin\sh.exe

 

If the above steps did not fix the issue, reboot the machine.

Additional Information

- In this specific instance, the problem app is CylancePROTECT
- CylancePROTECT sees bash.exe as a potential Stack Pivot exploit

Reference Cygwin FAQ:

https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.fixing-fork-failures

List of products known to cause conflicts with Cygwin:

https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.bloda