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fessen

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 4, 2011
104
12
Are there any good guides to El Capitan services and the ip addresses that El Capitan and common Mac software services attempt to make internet connections to?

I'm thinking along the lines of what Black Viper tries to do for Windows services (whatever you might think about the advice offered by Black Viper).

Monitoring internet connections with the app Little Snitch, I see a lot of ip address connections that El Capitan seems to be phoning home to. But I don't really know which of these can be safely blocked without crippling services that I actually want to work properly. If there were a guide somewhere, it would make it a lot easier to set the connections preferences without having to painstakingly go through testing blocks of each one individually.

One list I came across of ip addresses correlated with the services/apps attempting to use them lists almost 700 different ip addresses! But it doesn't explain what the services, such as com.apple.geod.xpc or fmfd, actually do.
 

fessen

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 4, 2011
104
12
Thanks for the link, but it only helps a little bit. I'm not really worried about port numbers, since the ones I am seeing are almost all 80 or 443.

What I'm looking for is an explanation of, for example:
AppleIDAuthAgent, which connects to identity.apple.com
or
akd, which connects to gsa.apple.com
or
com.apple.geod.xpc, which connects to multiple ip addresses

Is there a guide that explains why these are necessary and what happens if you block them?

There are a lot of processes like these.
 
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