Reported issues for mcp-server-malcolm

Pod holds 8 of 8 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team. Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded entirely — a maintainer's release checklist is not a warning to a prospective user.

Back to mcp-server-malcolm.

Most discussed

Publish to PyPI

The package is release-ready (CI green, unit-tested). Publishing is blocked on PyPI account/token setup.

Once the token exists: build sdist/wheel, upload, verify pip install mcp-server-malcolm from a clean environment, then add install instructions to the README.

Read the thread · 2026-07-17 · closed · 2 comments

§1 install check uses timeout, which macOS does not ship (and macOS/arm64 is now verified)

What happened

Two things in §1 Install that a macOS reader hits, one of them on the very first command they run.

1. The install check uses timeout, which macOS does not ship

timeout 3 mcp-server-malcolm < /dev/null

timeout is GNU coreutils. It is not part of the BSD userland macOS ships, so on a stock Mac this is command not found — on the one command whose entire job is to tell the reader the install worked. It only ran here because Homebrew coreutils is installed (

Read the thread · 2026-08-14 · closed · 1 comment

Design: opt-in write capabilities

The server is read-only by design, and read-only should stay the default posture. Some workflows would benefit from writes (e.g. tagging sessions, pcap upload — the upload endpoint is already exercised in the client code but not exposed as a tool).

Task: design what an opt-in write layer should look like — explicit per-tool allowlist, off by default, separate configuration flag — before any implementation.

Read the thread · 2026-07-17 · closed · 1 comment

Survey Malcolm API for additional read-only tool coverage

The server deliberately exposes a small read-only surface (OpenSearch DSL via the /mapi/opensearch proxy, field caps, pcap payload). Malcolm's API has more read-only endpoints that could be cheap wins (index/health introspection, Arkime session helpers, etc.).

Task: survey the Malcolm API surface, list read-only endpoints worth exposing as MCP tools, and rank them by value vs. effort. Implementation follows as separate PRs.

Read the thread · 2026-07-17 · closed · 1 comment

Per-tool disable list layered on the read groups

The problem

MALCOLM_MCP_DISABLE_READ_GROUPS trims at group granularity, and one group cannot be trimmed at all in practice. arkime is 11 tools and roughly 8,450 schema tokens, the largest block of the 51, and it is also the one nobody can drop: arkime_sessions is the only search that returns a session ID, so disabling the group takes every arkime-content tool down with it.

So the most expensive part of the read surface is the part group granularity cannot touch. A deployment that wa

Read the thread · 2026-08-14 · open · 0 comments

§2 should warn that the password on the claude mcp add line reaches shell history, ps, and ~/.claude.json

What happened

README §2 shows registration as:

claude mcp add malcolm \
  -e MALCOLM_PASSWORD='your-password' \
  …

and later warns that claude mcp get malcolm prints MALCOLM_PASSWORD in cleartext. That warning covers reading the value back, but not the two exposures the command itself creates:

1. Shell history. The literal password is typed on the command line, so it lands in ~/.zsh_history / ~/.bash_history and stays there.
2. ps output. While `claude mc

Read the thread · 2026-08-14 · closed · 0 comments

Accept MALCOLM_BASE_URL as a fallback for MALCOLM_URL

The problem

from_env reads MALCOLM_URL (client.py:316) and falls back to https://localhost when it is unset. That default is a sensible one, but combined with how people arrive at this server it produces a confusing first failure.

The path I took, which I suspect is common: I already had a Malcolm .env from another project, so I reused it. It names the variable MALCOLM_BASE_URL (alongside MALCOLM_USERNAME / MALCOLM_PASSWORD / MALCOLM_SSL_VERIFY, which all match this server

Read the thread · 2026-08-14 · open · 0 comments

README documents 1.0.2 while PyPI, pyproject and server.json are at 1.1.0

What happened

pyproject.toml, server.json and PyPI are all at 1.1.0, but the README still shows 1.0.2 everywhere it prints a version. A first-time reader compares the two and cannot tell whether they installed the wrong thing or the README is stale.

Places that carry the old number:

• §1 Install — the uv build transcript (mcp_server_malcolm-1.0.2.tar.gz, …-1.0.2-py3-none-any.whl) and the pip install line that follows it
• §2 Register it with your client — the `initial

Read the thread · 2026-08-14 · closed · 0 comments

Most recent

The remaining reports are on the project's issue tracker.