Airport won't work upon reboot unless I flush all firewall rules

Question

Airport won't work upon reboot unless I flush all firewall rules

After migrating my system to Snow Leopard on my iMac, I'm finding that when I boot, airport will not work. However, if I flush all the firewall rules, then it works fine. I use the terminal and enter "sudo ipfw -f flush"

What I'd like to know is what start up scripts might be screwing things up upon boot up, that requires me to then do this process manually?

Where are these scripts located? Can I change them? Or can I add this firewall script flush to the start up script?

The strange thing is that I don't have the OSX Firewall turned on (I use my router's hardware firewall).

Dual 2GHz PowerPC, MacBook Pro, 27" iMac Quad Core i7, Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Mar 31, 2010 3:58 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 31, 2010 5:47 PM in response to Howard Bornstein

I'll answer my own post. I found a bunch of old startup items in the library>startupitems folder. None of them seemed relevant so I removed them and rebooted. This time airport came up immediately.

So it seems that some older startup items that didn't have any problems under Leopard did tick off Snow Leopard. Removing them did the trick.

I didn't take the time to isolate the actual offending item. If I'm terribly bored one day, maybe I'll pinpoint it.

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Answer 2

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,191 points

Mar 31, 2010 8:51 PM in response to Howard Bornstein

Note that ipfw is included but not enabled by default in either Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, so the mere fact that you are using it makes your configuration non-standard.

Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard moved from use of ipfw to the newer (and, frankly, less configurable) application firewall, but (obviously) ipfw is still included for those who know how to configure and use it.

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Answer 3

Mar 31, 2010 10:00 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

I didn't really configure anything. I found some notes I had made a year ago when I had a problem with self-assigned IP addresses with Airport. This command is what I used to fix the problem then (under Leopard). I can not remember where I got the idea to do this, but when I tried it on my current situation it worked as before.

I haven't done anything to "enable" ipfw, so I just assume Snow Leopard can execute it as a terminal command like anything else.

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Answer 4

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,191 points

Apr 1, 2010 6:54 AM in response to Howard Bornstein

Howard Bornstein wrote:
I haven't done anything to "enable" ipfw, so I just assume Snow Leopard can execute it as a terminal command like anything else.

Correct - my point was if you do a clean install of Leopard or Snow Leopard, ipfw will never be called.

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Answer 5

Apr 1, 2010 11:05 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

William Kucharski wrote:
Correct - my point was if you do a clean install of Leopard or Snow Leopard, ipfw will never be called.

Oh I see. So ipfw must have been left over from my migration. Interesting. And lucky for me.

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