Why port blocking is bad

[torkell]

Because this is what you get if Java gets given port 3130 by Windows:



And in Eclipse I was greated by the wonderful message of:

FATAL ERROR in native method: No transports initialized
err:: No such file or directory
Error [2] in connect() call!
Socket transport failed to init.
Transport dt_socket failed to initialize, rc = -1.

Thank you, Norton.

Comments

[pewterfish.livejournal.com]

Reminds me why I don't have a personal firewall any more: Norton used to mess me about, and I couldn't be bothered to kick iptables into shape when I switched OS back in '02. Now, I rely on (a) having no external services running bar SSH and (b) the gateway firewall to watch my back. No problems as yet.

Remind me again why Norton blocks connections with both endpoints on the local machine?

[torkell]

Absolutely no idea. You actually have to explicitly allow them if you're running IIS, or strange stuff happens. Found that one the hard way - had IIS locked down to local private subnet and trusted IPs on http and ftp, and blocked everything. Then wondered why if I tried to stop/restart/admin IIS it fell over and locked. I also had to kill outbound e-mail virus scanning, as that was eating the encrypted connections OE needed to talk to the uni servers.