There is a firewall running I don't know about!

[Palli]

Hey all,
I'm trying to turn on the OS X 10.4.6 firewall but the settings screen always notifies me that there is another firewall running. I have absolutely no idea how this happened and I can't seem to find it. Does anybody know how to disable this without knowing exactly what program is causing it?
My router has a firewall but this notification also comes when I'm not connected to the router.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
-Palli

 

[eji]

What else are you running? Anything by Norton? Intego?

Did you install something like Brickhouse (aka Flying Buttress)?

I don't think there's any way for the built-in Mac OS X firewall to run in more than one instance simultaneously, so my guess is that it has to be third-party software.

To check for additional software that may be running at start-up or surreptitously, launch Activity Monitor and/or look in your login items under System Prefs -> Accounts (yours as well as other users on your machine) -> Login Items.

 

[bousozoku]

Open the Terminal application and check the man pages for ipfw and look for a flush option. Once you learn how, run it, and it should be reset and everything will be fine.

 

[Palli]

I tried something else; I installed DoorStop and started it. When I shut it down, OS X gave me permission to start the regular firewall. It's quite odd.

Thanks for the help though

 

[mkrishnan]

I tried something else; I installed DoorStop and started it. When I shut it down, OS X gave me permission to start the regular firewall. It's quite odd.

Thanks for the help though

Going back to what Bousozoku was saying, what probably happened is that some application other than the system preferences modified your ipfw settings (the back end of the Firewall in OS X). When that happened, OS X concluded that you were using another utility to manage your firewall and started giving you the warning when you tried to change it from sys prefs, since it didn't want "two chefs in the kitchen."

When you installed DoorStop, it must have flagged things to be reset and OS X gave you the option of letting it take ipfw back over.....