Tag Archives: mac

Sophos UTM 9 blocking continuity between iPhone, iPad, Mac

I just recently migrated from Untangle 11.2 to Sophos UTM to give it a ride and noticed that a lot of things are blocked (which is a good thing if you know what you are doing and need to unblock it).  Just recently I noticed that I couldn’t make any more calls by using my iPad or Mac through my iPhone.  So, continuity was not working like it was before.

I went to the Apple site (see sources), but couldn’t figure out what port or services were the one that needed to be allowed by the firewall.  So, after analyzing dropped packages by the firewall, I noticed a pattern and created the following firewall rule.  Since the creation of this firewall rule, I haven’t had any more issues with continuity nor downloading content from games in Game Center.

Overall network mapping: Internal network -> Allow ports 6384:16472 -> Any

  1. Go to “Network Protection”
  2. “Firewall”
  3. Click “New rule…”
  4. Under “Sources:” add “Internal (Network)”
  5. Under “Services” (you probably haven’t created this, so we are going to do it the long way), click on the “+” to add a new service
  6. Give it a name.  Probably “Apple Continuity”
  7. On “Destination port:” allow ports from “16384:16472”
  8.  Under “Comment” add these ports are “Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), Real-Time Control Protocol (RTCP)” for “iChat AV (Audio RTP, RTCP; Video RTP, RTCP), FaceTime, and Game Center”
  9. Click “Save”
  10. Under “Destinations:” add “Any”
  11. (Optional) Add comment
  12. Click “Save”

Now you should be able to use Apple continuity by handing over calls over your iPad and/or Mac from your phone under the same network.

Hopefully Sophos UTM could include this as default with their future releases.

Source: TCP and UDP ports used by Apple software products – Apple Support

Microsoft Office 2008 Database Problem – The macosxhints Forums

If you ever have issues when re-installing office on your mac by getting this error

There is a problem with the Office database

Office might be unable to access the database or the database file might be damaged. Without the database, you might be unable to use the Address Book, Scrapbook, and other features that store your personal information.

To rebuild the database, open Microsoft Office 2008/Office, and then open the Microsoft Database Utility. For more information, open the Database Utility application, and on the Help menu, click Database Utility Help.

The section below will help you solve it!!!

Deleting “Main Identity” only did not help me. Here is how I solved
it:
1- Deleted “Microsoft User Data” folder under Documents
2- Deleted all com.microsoft.* under ~/Library/Preferences
3- Deleted Microsoft folder under ~/Library/Preferences
I then re-ran Office Setup Assistant, and problem solved.

via Microsoft Office 2008 Database Problem – The macosxhints Forums.

XAMPP

XAMPP is an application that it would help you to facilitate the hassle of installing Apache web server, MySQL, Perl and PHP individually. This tutorial will show you step by step on how to install XAMPP in Lunix and have it auto started with your computer. This tutorial was tested on Ubunut and Fedora. Replace x.x.x for the XAMPP version.

Steps:

  1. Go to http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html and download “XAMPP Linux x.x.x”
  2. Open up the “Termial
  3. Become a root user bu typing “su
  4. Type the administrator password
  5. Go to where the file “xampp-linux-x.x.x.tar.gz” is downloaded
  6. Extract the files by typing this “tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.7.tar.gz -C /opt

Now XAMPP will be under “/opt/lampp” folder. In order to run XAMPP you will need to run this… “/opt/lampp/lampp start” as a root. If you want to stop it just replace start for stop.

To test whether your server is up go and open your web browser and type “http://localhost“. If it works you are now good to go to the next step.

This step is setting up XAMPP security. In order to do that being the root type “/opt/lampp/lampp security“.

To remove XAMPP from your system type “rm -rf /opt/lampp

If you want to have XAMPP starting with your machine when it turns on follow this steps.

  1. Find out your default runlevel type “egrep :initdefault: /etc/inittab
    You should no see a line containing a number between two colons. In most cases 3 or 5 (2 if you’re using Debian).
  2. Go into the directory which configures this runlevel. If for example your runlevel is 3, then you have to change directory into the “/etc/rc.d/rc3.d” directory.If your system didn’t provide /etc/rc.d/rc3.d please try also /etc/init.d/rc3.d and /etc/rc3.d.
  3. Now setup XAMPP to start when your computer turns on type”ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp S99lampp
    ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp K01lampp

    Now XAMPP should start and stop automatically if you boot or shutdown your machine.

And that’s it.  Hopefully you had success like I did 😛