How to open a port?

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Level 1

118 points

How to open a port?

On Leopard opening a port was easy. Go into the sharing preferences and add the port or range of ports that you want open. With Snow Leopard Apple changed it to this weird "block application access" method that my old Unix-y brain is having a hard time understanding.

How do I tell the firewall that I just want to open a port? Is this now only accomplished via the shell?

MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Oct 2, 2009 9:14 PM

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Answer 1

j.v.

Level 5

4,155 points

Oct 2, 2009 9:27 PM in response to Paul Rothrock

Yes, or by using a GUI front end program like WaterRoof.

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Answer 2

Paul Rothrock Author

Level 1

118 points

Oct 3, 2009 5:25 AM in response to j.v.

Well, that doesn't make any sense.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,306 points

Oct 3, 2009 6:36 AM in response to Paul Rothrock

Apple tried to make it simple for people who have no need/desire to open a port. They just want to use iChat (or whatever). If you have a program that needs to use a port, it requests it, and the Application Firewall asks you if you want to allow it. Then, the port is opened as needed.

If you want to create an open port, not tied to an application, then the previous poster gave you one method.

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Answer 4

j.v.

Level 5

4,155 points

Oct 3, 2009 9:04 AM in response to Barney-15E

I wish I could figure out how, in Sys Prefs > Security > Firewall, one could add an entry tied to a particular application for things like smtpd, rather than have to use ipfw to open port 25 for unestablished inbound traffic.

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