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Go back to my question Mac / Mac Pro User profile for user: Randall White Randall White Author User level: Level 1 18 points How to open ports on macOS 12.2

Everything was working fine and then it wasn't…

I have had port 8444 open for a year, the other day I woke up to a MacPro that had restarted because of an issue. In starting up my apps I found that Port 8444 was closed. I contacted AT&T and the tech had all kinds of issues and escalated, her supervisor "Skyler" stated that he determined the issue was with my Mac and just unilaterally cut off and disconnected the chat. How rude…

Anywayz I'm trying to check on opening that port and don't see any recent Support answers

I tried installing Homebrew, but that doesn't seem to make the "nmap -p 8444 localhost" command to be recognized

Mac Pro, macOS 12.1

Posted on Feb 9, 2022 9:24 AM

Me too (15) Me too Me too (15) Me too Reply Question marked as Top-ranking reply User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder User level: Level 10 140,297 points

Posted on Feb 9, 2022 12:14 PM

As long as you do not deliberately invoke the MacOS firewall (which is completely unnecessary) ALL ports are already open on your Mac.

Your Mac is protected from attack over the internet by a Network/Router feature called Network Address Translation.

In Internet networking, a private network is a computer network that uses a private address space of IP addresses. These addresses are commonly used for local area networks (LANs) in residential, office, and enterprise environments.

from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network

IPv4 Addresses in the range of 192.168.xxx.yyy, 10.xxx.yyy.zzz, or 172.16.xxx.yyy are NOT available for use on the Internet at large. To send a message on the Internet, your Router acts as your agent, substitutes its own, network-visible address, and sends out requests on your behalf. any unsolicited incoming requests are discarded by default, unless you enable port forwarding aka open a port on your router.

So when we talk about 'Opening a Port', this ALWAYS means a port on your Router, and in addition to Opening, you need to specify what local IP address the requests that come in, tagged with that port number, are to be sent. In general, when you forward a port, you should also commit to manual IP address for the computer to which those requests will be forwarded.

If you have reconfigured or reset you network so that your target computer has received a different DHCP address than previous, these incoming request could be being sent to a different device than before.

In general, the work of opening ports is done on your Router. Ports on your Mac are all already open.

If the software involved were a multi-player game, many of these games use a standard protocol to talk to your Router and do the work of opening the port for you.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder User level: Level 10 140,297 points

Feb 9, 2022 12:14 PM in response to Randall White

As long as you do not deliberately invoke the MacOS firewall (which is completely unnecessary) ALL ports are already open on your Mac.

Your Mac is protected from attack over the internet by a Network/Router feature called Network Address Translation.

In Internet networking, a private network is a computer network that uses a private address space of IP addresses. These addresses are commonly used for local area networks (LANs) in residential, office, and enterprise environments.

from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network

IPv4 Addresses in the range of 192.168.xxx.yyy, 10.xxx.yyy.zzz, or 172.16.xxx.yyy are NOT available for use on the Internet at large. To send a message on the Internet, your Router acts as your agent, substitutes its own, network-visible address, and sends out requests on your behalf. any unsolicited incoming requests are discarded by default, unless you enable port forwarding aka open a port on your router.

So when we talk about 'Opening a Port', this ALWAYS means a port on your Router, and in addition to Opening, you need to specify what local IP address the requests that come in, tagged with that port number, are to be sent. In general, when you forward a port, you should also commit to manual IP address for the computer to which those requests will be forwarded.

If you have reconfigured or reset you network so that your target computer has received a different DHCP address than previous, these incoming request could be being sent to a different device than before.

In general, the work of opening ports is done on your Router. Ports on your Mac are all already open.

If the software involved were a multi-player game, many of these games use a standard protocol to talk to your Router and do the work of opening the port for you.

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User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder User level: Level 10 140,297 points

Feb 10, 2022 6:42 PM in response to Randall White

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".

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User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder User level: Level 10 140,297 points

Feb 10, 2022 1:08 PM in response to Randall White

Does the cited device named Mac-Pro still point to your Mac Pro at its current IP address?

I tried to suggest earlier that if you allowed DHCP to provide the address, sooner or later the Mac Pro would get a random address, and that nailing that IP address down with a manual IP address assignment was appropriate.

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User profile for user: MrHoffman MrHoffman Community+ 2025 User level: Level 10 145,259 points

Feb 11, 2022 8:59 AM in response to Randall White

Register the MAC address from the Mac Pro into the DHCP database in the router, and set a fixed address.

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User profile for user: Tesserax Tesserax User level: Level 10 157,902 points

Feb 10, 2022 9:10 AM in response to Randall White

As Grant Bennet-Alder has already mentioned, if either software firewall on your Mac: Socket Filter (Application-layer) or Packet Filter (Network Layer), is not enabled (they are not, by default), then it's NOT your Mac that would be blocking this port ... or any port.

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.

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User profile for user: Tesserax Tesserax User level: Level 10 157,902 points

Feb 10, 2022 11:40 AM in response to Randall White

Well, my only parting thoughts would be does AT&T provide you with administrator rights to allow you to make configuration changes on this gateway device? If so, you can, at least, see if there are any firewall rules or port blocking enabled. Other than that, good luck! Sorry, that I couldn't offer any assistance with this.

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User profile for user: Randall White Randall White Author User level: Level 1 18 points

Feb 9, 2022 10:27 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

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

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User profile for user: Tesserax Tesserax User level: Level 10 157,902 points

Feb 9, 2022 1:34 PM in response to Randall White

To add to Grant Bennet-Alder's excellent reply, are you using your Mac Pro as a server that will be accessed from the Internet? Typically port 8444 is used for Bitmessage. Also, did you download nmap by using the Homebrew package manager?

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User profile for user: Randall White Randall White Author User level: Level 1 18 points

Feb 10, 2022 8:35 AM in response to Tesserax

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

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User profile for user: Randall White Randall White Author User level: Level 1 18 points

Feb 10, 2022 9:51 AM in response to Tesserax

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.

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User profile for user: Randall White Randall White Author User level: Level 1 18 points

Feb 10, 2022 11:58 AM in response to Tesserax

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.

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User profile for user: Randall White Randall White Author User level: Level 1 18 points

Feb 10, 2022 6:16 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

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.

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User profile for user: Randall White Randall White Author User level: Level 1 18 points

Feb 11, 2022 9:03 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

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

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User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder User level: Level 10 140,297 points

Feb 9, 2022 10:19 AM in response to Randall White

You ARE holding it wrong.

¿what are you using this for, and what software is being used?

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How to open ports on macOS 12.2

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