[Privoxy-users] Installation on Windows 11

[Ian Silvester]

Sure, I'm happy to come up with instructions, but I don't yet fully understand the problem. There are obviously many apps out there that run as admin (or at least not as the logged-in user) that display a tray icon. Is it a side-effect of Cygwin that the process has to run as the current user in order to display a tray icon?

If so, my opinion is as follows:

We offer two installation paths. For those who wish to run multiple users on the same machine and/or want a fire-and forget setup, we install with --install and don't worry about the lack of icon (I'd suggest such users won't miss it). For those who want the tray icon we offer instructions for granting the logged-in user read/write access to the install location. 

Thoughts? 


On Fri, 2 May 2025, at 06:52, Lee wrote:
> On Thu, May 1, 2025 at 1:27 PM Ian Silvester  wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 1 May 2025, at 09:05, Lee via Privoxy-users wrote:
>> > On Thu, May 1, 2025 at 8:39 AM Ian Silvester wrote:
>> >>
>> >> My experience FWIW is that if I install as my daily driver account, even if that account has admin,
>> >> upon reboot Privoxy throws an error that it cannot write to ./privoxy.log and dies. I find I have to
>> >> use -install to avoid this issue. Same behaviour on Win 10 and 11.
>> >
>> > You probably took the default and installed Privoxy in "\Program files\Privoxy"
>> > "c:\Program files" does not normally allow regular users to write to
>> > anything there, so you can either
>> >  a) do what I do and create a "c:\temp" that anyone can write to and
>> > have privoxy logging set to "c:\temp\privoxy.log"
>> > or
>> >  b) modify file permissions on "c:\Program files\Privoxy" or
>> > "c:\Program files\Privoxy\privoxy.log" to allow anyone to write there.
>> > There's a FAQ for
>> >   What to do if editing the config file of privoxy is access denied?
>> > that's also applicable to the privoxy log file.
>> >
>> > Lee
>> >
>>
>> Yes quite. Couldn't you alter the installer to offer a default location to which the user
>> does have write access?
>
> I don't know if windows has a place for installing software that
> anyone can write to.
> I'm guessing it doesn't because ransomware or anything else could take
> advantage and replace programs in the "anyone can write here"
> directory.
>
> There are per-user directories that could be used - but they are one
> per user so if you had say 3 users you'd have to have 3 installs of
> privoxy.  And 3 separate config, action, filter files, etc.
> On the other hand, per-user directories would be great for the privoxy
> log file.  Having a single log file that everyone can read is a
> security issue .. which is why logging was defaulted to off ages ago??
> The problem is how to tell privoxy where the per-user file is :(  I
> suppose the easiest way would be to add a '--logdir' command line
> option to specify the logdir - eg
>
> C:\cygwin\home\Lee\t>args_mingw.exe a b --logdir %LOCALAPPDATA%\privoxy
> argv[0]: args_mingw.exe
> argv[1]: a
> argv[2]: b
> argv[3]: --logdir
> argv[4]: C:\Users\Lee\AppData\Local\privoxy
>
> I just tried changing the privoxy startup shortcut to have
>    %APPDATA%\privoxy\config.txt
> as the config file parameter.  And it works :)
> ... at least on my windows 10 machine
>
> So there is an easy way to have a per-user config file.  The downside
> being an "include <this> file in the config" directive was never
> implemented, so we're back to maintaining a config file per user.
>
> On the other hand, it's highly probably a '--logdir whatever' command
> line parameter could be added and that would get
> 1) a per-user log file
> 2) that doesn't have the "anyone can look at it" security problem so
> we could enable logging again
> 3) and that most users will forget about, fill up their hard drive if
> logging is enabled and cause who-knows-what problems.
> which takes care of .. 80% of the problem?
>
>> Or, if Windows doesn't allow that, include an explanation
>> screen during install?
>
> Are you offering to write this?
>
> You'll notice that I didn't actually explain anything in FAQ for how
> to fix windows file permissions - just showed an example of how to
> "use the windows equivalent of sudo" and an example of using icacls to
> fix individual file permissions problems.  Cargo cult documentation at
> it's finest :)
>
>> I feel like the 'out of the box' experience should work without
>> the user having to know this.
>
> Are you offering?
>
> I can take a look at adding a --logdir command line param - that seems
> like something I can do.
> Adding an include directive to the config file processing seems a bit
> much for me :(
> as does interpreting %evar% directives in the config file
>
> and as we've already seen, I think explaining windows file permissions
> to users is beyond me.
>
> Regards,
> Lee