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Re: Automatically opening the firewall?
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Re: Automatically opening the firewall?

On Jul 25, 2004, at 1:33 PM, Frederick Cheung wrote:


On 25 Jul 2004, at 20:34, Chaz McGarvey wrote:

Hello:

Is there a way to detect if a port is being blocked by the firewall OS X uses? If so, is there a way to programmatically open a port? What I think would be nice is that when my server was run, it could detect if its port was being blocked and inform the user about this and offer to open it for them. In fact, now that I think about it, it would kind of be nice if the system did that automatically whenever listen() (or equivalent) was called and then closed the port when the server stopped listening. Would this be too big of a security risk?
I don't believe there is an API to query the firewall or modify its rules. You wouldn't be able to change rules without superuser privileges.

Automatically opening a port whenever listen was called would entirely defeat the point of having the firewall rules in the first place

That would certainly be true if programs were allowed to open ports without permission from the user (with superuser privileges). But this is different because it asks the user much like authenticating currently works. This would basically just be a convenience for the user. Users could always accomplish the same thing by opening System Preferences and going into Sharing and clicking on Firewall and clicking on New and scrolling the popup to Other and typing in the port (which they may not know) and clicking OK. All that could be done by entering a superuser name and password and clicking OK and it would be done by the system.

Actually, the main reason I care and the reason I brought it up is because with this feature at least users would know why other people can't connect to their server. It's just kind of an annoying support question for me. Oh well.

Chaz McGarvey
http://www.brokenzipper.com
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References: 
 >Automatically opening the firewall? (From: Chaz McGarvey <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Automatically opening the firewall? (From: Frederick Cheung <email@hidden>)



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