Norton Personal Firewall / Limewire port 45100

[candyangel]

G4 400 / OS 10.2.8, BSD installed / Limewire 3.6.14

I have Norton Personal Firewall set to leave ports 6346 & 6347 open for Gnutella.
~*~

When I try to open Limewire, Norton P/F tells me:

"The program Limewire has opened port 45100 on your computer, but your firewall does not allow connections to this port. Do you want to change your firewall's settings so connections to this port are allowed?"

*confused* Why is Limewire opening that port?
Do I need to change my firewall settings, or should I just ignore this?

~Candy Angel

[candyangel]

just an update here ...

1) every time I open Limewire, it makes from 1-3 attempts to open a really high numbered port; which causes Norton Firewall to popup warnings.
The port numbers do seem to vary, but are always 5 digits; and almost always starting with a 4 or 5.

2) The high numbered ports don't seem to be used for that "magnetmix" stuff, as I can d/l that without those high numbered ports being open.

3) I turned off the "send bug reports automatically", thinking that might be the reason, but Limewire still continues to try and open more high numbered ports on my Mac, so I don't think that's it either.

I have no idea why Limewire keeps opening ports in such a high number range, but it's really annoying to have to go through Norton Firewall to reset all the port settings that Limewire messes up every single time I open Limewire.

Anyone know why Limewire keeps trying to open those ports at every startup? Or how to stop it?
Thanks if you can help.

[sberlin]

Hi candyangel,

This is by design. We open up a high number port (anywhere from 45100 to 45110) as an alternate means of handling magnet links. Currently we don't actually receive any information on this port, but it's possible to. We open it so that programs (like a web-browser) on your computer can contact LimeWire and tell it to do stuff. LimeWire will ignore any information that it receives on that port from the outside world, meaning that the only instructions it will handle are those from your computer.

[candyangel]

Thank you for the info.

So, it sounds like if I set N/PF to "allow outgoing" but "deny incoming" from that port, it should be OK?

~Candy

[sberlin]

I'm not positive how Norton Firewall works, it's a possibility that denying incoming traffic could break some functionality. You'd have to ask the Norton people if the firewall allows processes within a computer to communicate with each other while disallowing outside traffic from enterring.