Getting around the Firefox port-blocking annoyance
Firefox 3.x has introduced something I'm sure they call a 'feature', but is a major annoyance for any sysadmin and developer -- they block access to ports other than 80. I thought IE was the only browser that was brain-dead that way, but Firefox has proved me wrong. Anyway, here's a simple recipe for getting around this:
1) go to about:config in the Firefox address bar
2) right click, choose new->string
3) enter the name network.security.ports.banned.override and the value 1-65535
4) there is no step 4
1) go to about:config in the Firefox address bar
2) right click, choose new->string
3) enter the name network.security.ports.banned.override and the value 1-65535
4) there is no step 4
posted by Grig Gheorghiu at
10:13 AM
6 Comments:
Mozilla has had selective port blocking for a long time due to security reasons. It is a good thing, and you shouldn't disable it in your main profile. You should go read the reasons and the specific blocked ports here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/PortBanning.html
If you are a developer, first consider if you could use some unblocked port. Second best alternative would be to use a developer profile in which you disable port blocking only for the specific ports you need (you can launch multiple firefox processes with -no-remote option).
By
Heikki Toivonen, at 11:42 AM
I've never run into this myself so this was news to me.
It appears they only block a (fairly reasonable) specific set of ports that are used by other protocols: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/PortBanning.html
If it's any consolation "Allow the user to decide if the blocking is really required." is on the list of "Things to do".
By
Justin Driscoll, at 11:47 AM
Yeah never ran into that either.
By
Philipp Schumann, at 4:52 PM
I regularly connect to port 8000 on my own server, so it seems to me there really isn't much of a problem.
By
Manuzhai, at 11:27 PM
Sorry, I should have made it more clear that it's *selective* port blocking, not wholesale blocking of any port different from 80. But still, Firefox blocks ports such as 81, 82, etc -- which is a major annoyance in my line of work (we're mapping various Tomcat instances to those ports for example.)
Grig
By
Grig Gheorghiu, at 9:37 AM
Thanks for the tip. I use firefox to view Internet cameras on different ports. I unblocked them in v2 but when I upgraded to v3 the ports were blocked again. After issuing the warning firefox should allow the user to continue if they want to.
By
Craig, at 3:30 PM
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home