How to open ports on macOS 12.2

I've had port 8444 open for a year

Before the issue was to open the port at the router. ATT claims that it is open on their end.

So how do I check that if the MacPro or OS 12.2 has a new security feature that is blocking that port?

I want peers to be able to connect to my computer, that is all you need to know about that

Tesserax, the "nmap" command doesn't work, even though I installed Homebrew. I'm getting:

#nmap -p 8444

-bash: nmap: command not found

#

That's an entirely different issue

I'm looking at the possibility that Port 8444 is closed on my MacPro and not on my AT&T Fiber router. Over a year ago, I called AT&T tech and they opened that port for me. I'd prefer to be able to open it myself, but that worked.

To port forward on port 8444 is part of synching and downloading on a blockchain. [ I am, intentionally, not identifying that ]

When I use https://portchecker.co/ it shows that 8444 is closed. My inclination is to believe that the AT&T support got frustrated for some reason and that port is actually closed on their router and has nothing to do with my MacPro. But I really don't have a way to prove that, currently.

It's an AT&T model BGW320-505 gateway

Tesserax wrote:

If I had to guess, AT&T is "monitoring" activities, like bitcoin mining, over their network and blocking them should they exceed some pre-defined threshold level.

That's a reasonable guess, but that's only a guess. If that was the case, then there would be many people complaining about that. So far I have not seen any evidence of that, even on my Keybase or GitHub channels. So, that suspicion is unlikely.

My best guess is that Skyler (AT&T supervisor) was having a bad day, and that I should try a different avenue there. It's just that I spent over two hours and over five restarts before I was escalated to Skyler, then he closed the chat and made some hasty generalizations within two minutes. Very uncharacteristic; but that does enhance that "monitoring" bandwidth guess.

That PortChecker link is independent of any crypto/gaming/NFT software, other than the browser, so it serves as an objective base-point — as long as their code is working.

There could also be some sort of malware that closes certain ports so that there are fewer servers on the network.

It seems as though Skyler was correct. I had to dig around a bit to find the "administrator rights" IP address. I have been here before. As you can see, on this page, Port 8444 is open. So it really does come down to determining if Port 8444 is blocked on the Mac Pro. I DO have the firewall turned off.

Grant,

The IP address at https://portchecker.co/ has remained static before and after contacting AT&T so the DHCP is irrelevant.

I'm hoping that there's someone who knows how to check, with Terminal, if Port 8444 is closed on the Mac Pro.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

I am not talking about the Internet-visible IP address.

When a port on your Router is opened, your router does port forwarding. ¿is it forwarding to the correct local IP address?

I am talking about what local IP address (from the range of Private IP address used INSIDE your network) is currently in use by the device your Router calls "Mac-Pro".

Grant,

My bad…

That was interesting. On the gateway's Device List page it matched (xxx.67) Then I hit "Clear and Rescan for Devices" and still matched the IPv4 Address and the IPv6 Addresses

The Mac Pro preferences showed the same xxx.67

The gateway also shows xxx.64 allocated to Wi-Fi

I turned off Wi-Fi and rechecked with the https://portchecker.co/ in case that was the confusion, but it still showed that Port 8444 was still closed with just an Ethernet hardwire connection.

In that time I also had a System software update from 12.2 to macOS 12.2.1

After that I also renewed the DHCP Lease from Mac System Preferences