Screen Sharing/Firewall Catastrophe: HELP!

[James Sentman]

On Oct 30, 2013, at 1:53 AM, George Handley <ghandley at kc.rr.com> wrote:

> I have not touched XTension at all today, and for the last couple weeks have enjoyed some much needed stability in my system since KCP&L tightened up my service, although I'm not totally out of the woods there either.
> 
> Anyway, I followed your Screen Sharing thread all day, and early on discovered that my Mini, running XTension, also did not have it's firewall on, and when turned on, just like Henk, I discovered I no longer had Screen Sharing from my iMac.
> 
> Well, I got that fixed, and have full screen sharing back, but though I can't imagine the connection, I now have about 5-10 units that no longer work… just because I temporarily turned on my Mini's firewall!
> 
> I have also tried to follow your instructions for a temporary fix, but it does not work for me. My problem is not that I don't have screen sharing… my problem is that without touching anything in XTension on my Mini, and ONLY by turning on and then off the Mini's firewall, I have lost control of from 5-10 units I have discovered so far.
> 
> This makes no sense at all to me, and I know James and Michael are going to say there can't be any connection, but honest to God, that's the ONLY thing I did to the Mini, and immediately afterward, I began noticing things no longer working that had been working for years… literally. I have no manual control over them either from within XTension.
> 
> I also made another discovery that smells of Permissions.
> 
> I ran Disk Utility on both machines and it finds a slug of wrong permissions, and says it fixes them, but even after rebooting, and running a permissions repair again, I find both machines didn't correct the permissions like it reported. Disk Utility's log also had this line roll by:
> 
> "Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired."
> 
> I have exhausted my patience with this, and realize I'm in over my head. However, I think and sure hope this situation allows somebody to explain how I fix this.
> 

That particular error is on apples list of permissions errors you can safely ignore: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

and I don’t believe that is related to your problem. XTension makes extensive use of sockets to talk to itself (it could theoretically be a distributed system where the low level communications to the devices happen on all separate machines) If you’re going to use a firewall then you need to specifically allow local connections to XTension on port 20300, or just clear the app for all ports. If you turned on and off the firewall it’s possible that XTensions comm got blocked and hung itself up. Are those units that don’t respond on a specific interface separate from the others? Each interface makes it’s own internal connection and might have been dropped. But then after a restart that should all be back to normal. If the firewall rules have stuck even though you’ve turned it on then you may need to look up how to clear those rules manually.

If the units that aren’t responding are on the same interface as others which are responding (if you have multiple interfaces you have multiple TCP connections) then the problem cannot actually be related to turning on the firewall at all and is just coincident...

Thanks,
 	James


James Sentman                       http://sentman.com		http://MacHomeAutomation.com