Cannot connect to ARD client v3.7 with firewall enabled

Yes been up and working constantly for quite a few week now and had no issuesafter restarts.

Hi,

I want to chime in and state I am having the same problem ever since I upgraded my Lion client to ARD 3.7 - Now I can't connect to it using ARD 3.7 ( 370A71) from my admin machine. All my 3.6.2 clients work fine. I am interested in hearing of when this problem gets fixed because turning off Firewall or enabling screen sharing are not options I have for a variety of security reasons. I hope Apple comes out with a fix.

you might be experiencing the Firewall problem. if you see individual processes like screensharingd in the list of apps, then you're seeing a Firewall problem that has been around for a very long time, at least since Leopard. my wife and I are currently seeing this problem on both my Mac Pro (2008) and our new iMac (2013), both running new clean installations of Mavericks (not updates over an old system).

basically, if you set the Firewall and restart your Mac, the Firewall options list every system process involved rather than groups of services. the firewall also doesn't work properly. for example, file sharing can stop sharing.

the fix (for me) is to delete the Firewall preferences file, restart your Mac and turn the Firewall back on. then, never restart your Mac unless you need to. put it to Sleep instead.

the preference file is at:

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist

you will need to authenticate to remove the file.

for convenience, I run the following AppleScript before every restart:

do shell script "sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist" ¬

user name "my_account" password "my_password" with administrator privileges

Thanks Gregory for your input. Though, actually, I can't connect to my Lion ARD client no matter what I do. Turning firewall off does not allow me to connect to my client. I even tried exactly what you said about deleting the prefs and restarting, and still it does not matter. Everytime I try to connect to the 3.7 client, the connecting dialog box comes up and tries to connect but never does, so my only option is to hit Stop. No problems connecting to any client with ARD version 3.6.2 and below.

Hopefully Apple comes out with an update to ARD to fix the problem.

I have ARD 3.7 on a 10.9 and 10.8.5 server, I can control both from my ARD 3.7 on my iMac running 10.9 only with the FireWall turned off. What I find is, after controlling a Mac with ARD 3.6.2, I haveto quit the App and re-open it, then I can control ok

Yes, it looks like 3.7.1 has solved my problems too. It's the code they meant to write first time, but didn't.

Apple was probably just fooling with us... :-)

Yeah, last night on my home Maverick iMac, an update appeared and I was curious cause I just updated the new Maverick iWork apps a few weeks ago. To my amazement, it was an update to ARD. I updated it, but no need for home use. I couldn't wait to get to work the next morning to see if the update appears on my Lion client I was having issues connecting to. The update was there! I applied the 3.7.1 update, and I checked my Remote Desktop admin app and I was greatly suprised I connected to the Lion client right away. Apple has fixed the problem allowing 3.7 ARD clients to be remotely connected!

Well I started having remote access issues when I installed RDC 3.7.1 on my two Mavericks systems. Prior to that I could remote access to them with no problems, afterwards it'd fail to connect to both of them. Restarting both machines made no difference.

The notes for 3.7.1 talk about firewall settings issues with 3.7 that 3.7.1 supposedly fixes (after a restart) so I had a look at the firewall settings and found that incoming connections for screensharingd were blocked on both machines so I switched this to 'Allow' and tried again, still no luck. Then I restarted both machines again and they both worked after that.

I did notice a couple of other oddities in the firewall settings with both systems -- there were three entries in both firewalls to allow incoming for AppleFileServer, which seemed very odd and redundant so I removed two of them. And ubd was blocked on both as well, so I changed that to allow also, but I doubt that had any effect on the remote access issue as I believe ubd is for iCloud document sharing.

I would suggest deleting the Firewall preference file, then rebooting and re-configuring the Firewall to clean any dirt left in the system from before the update was installed.

BEWARE 3.71 not so great after all.

I have two remote server Mac Minis that did not have 3.7 that were upgraded straight to 3.71 today. (They are both Lion I think!). I lost access to both so 3.71 does not seem to be much of a fix to me.

I've got one switched to screen sharing and back under control but it is now too late at night to try the other.