my iTunes insists on trying to access port 5353 every so often, no matter what I do. I've gone through the iTunes preferences three times now, disabling anything having anything to do with network traffic, and still failing. I have disabled sharing my music, accessing other people's shared music, stupid apple wlan speakers that only work with iTunes, and disabled pod casts, I couldn't care less about them. It seems the macs in my network are bombarding my machine, too, with the same annoying feature. Oh well.
How do I tell iTunes not to try to access that network port, ever, for any reason? By uninstalling it? If the options are either uninstall or blocking it permanently from my software fire wall, I rather uninstall it and find a software that does what I tell it to, and nothing else. Too bad that probably means I have to throw away my 40GB iPod, but that's life.
Yes, I saw that 5353 was used for Bonjour/music sharing. However I have uninstalled that service...iTunes keeps using it, though.
(apologies, working from potentially-unreliable memory here, filtered through a lack of basic understanding of the technology ... most of the Snoop Dogg and toonz posts i saw on this have been in threads deleted recently.)
my understanding is that all itunes versions with music sharing apart from 5.0.0.35 contained a cut-down "internal" version of the Bonjour/Rendevous technology. 5.0.1.4 reverted back to the version of the internal service used by 4.9.
so i figure that 4.9 version of the internal service (or something similar) is still going on with 6.0.x.
I was alerted to an issue with v5 (
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,14317513~days=9999) a while ago. Basically Bonjour opens a port in your firewall to get to the internet. It doesn't seem to want to share only accross your LAN, but will only function correctly if it can get to the shop.
I'm new to this (iTunes stuff anyway), but I'm concerned about this security issue. Do I 'force' everyone on our LAN to revert to version 4.9 or lower or is there a patch/fix that I can use that will allow local sharing without opening up to the Internet?
Can anyone put my mind at rest about this?
Sorry about a slow reply. Basically I don't allow ANY network traffic in my local LAN unless I know what it's all about and agree it should be allowed. iTunes trying to access the network after I've told it not to do anything even remotely related to that is something I do NOT want to see. Same goes for any other software.
The world is full of spyware, I really don't need iTunes to add to that.
an update on the information already posted in here. itunes isn't necessarily trying to access the internet when you see that port activity. itunes/airtunes also uses that port 5353 to look for Airport Express base stations on your home network. see:
5353 is the Bonjour port, and it's used by both the music sharing features as well as the Remote Speaker functionality. Disable both of those and it will not need that port.
Bonjour only acts on the local LAN, it will not transverse to another subnet. So it's not going to hit your firewall (by which I mean another machine acting as a firewall for a network, as opposed to those crappy firewall products like ZoneAlarm, none of which work anyway).