Figure out your OS X ports and firewall settings


I just spent the last hour trying to figure out why Back To My Mac hasn’t been working for the last couple of weeks. After prodding around, I realized that my Firewall settings were updated a couple of weeks ago, and all of my port forwards were wrong. Turns out that I misplaced all of my info regarding important ports in OS X.

After some googling around, I stumbled upon a giant list of TCP and UDP ports used by Apple on Apple’s website. I thought I’d pass it along, just in case anyone needs it.

You’ll find everything from standard port information (21,22, 80, etc) to VNC ports, iChat server ports, and XGrid ports in this giant table. It’s a handy resource to have. I’d recommend bookmarking it for future reference.

For quick reference, you need to open the following ports for Back To My Mac:

  1. 5354 (TCP)
  2. 500 (UDP)
  3. 4500 (UDP)

Hopefully this saves you a giant headache.

Article Via Apple’s Knowledge Base

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio