Firewall Stealth mode goes off when sleeping???

[Lumute]

Hi everyone,

I have Stealth mode enable on a MAC Mini with 10.8.2 (for particular networking reasons unrelated to this post), but when it goes to sleep it suddenly starts responding to ping??? then it stops when it wakes up, its like the sleep mode is temporarily disabling the stealth mode?

Does this make any sense? do you guys have any idea how to fix this? I want my mac to be able to go to sleep but it seems like being stealth requires concentration which is not possible while sleeping...

This seems to me like a big security bug...

 

[switon]

RE: Mac mini...ICMP echo requests...

Hi Lumute,

Interesting! Is your Mac mini connected directly to the Internet, or is it behind some type of router? If you are using a router, then configure the router to dump the ICMP echo requests. Your router never goes to sleep, so your Mac mini will be protected from pings from the Internet.

Or you could easily write your own firewall rule to dump all ICMP echo requests on your Mac mini...

Regards,
Switon

 

[Lumute]

Hi Switon,

Thanks for the reply, it is indeed behind a firewall and my problem is not really security related but when I realized this happens I intermediately though this is very bad for security... I'll explain my problem, maybe you have an idea:

I need to be able to know when my Mac is sleeping and be able to wake it remotely. Normally a computer sleeping does not respond to ping but the network card is listening to packets sent to the MAC Address so you can wake the OS up. The new WakeOnDemand implemented on Lions makes the computer pingable while sleeping so it can receive TCP/IP packets and the Os can process them for services like Bonjour. This new feature cannot be separated from the regular standard old good and simple WakeOnLan, you either turn them both on or both off with the "Wake for Network Access" setting... So I though: ok, let's somehow disable ICMP replies when sleeping. Using scripting with SleepWatcher I can make the Mac stealth when going to seep and remove stealth when waking up, this seemed like a solution and that is when I found this problem, the OS disables stealth when sleeping which to me is absurd and very insecure...

My older MAC Mini with 10.6.8 works just fine, it stops responding to ping when sleeping and wakes up when receives the "MagicPacket".

A lot of people is having problems with WOL on ML and waking them up using the "MagicPacket" does not work unless you use a hack to disable "darkwake", so I got the waking up working but still unable to know when its sleeping... :-( I guess I'll have to wait for 10.8.3 to see if any of this has been fixed, I heard it should be out soon...