Mozilla/Firebird port blocking
December 10th, 2003
When I'm working from home, I use PuTTY to port forward from ports on my computer, to ports on the network servers at work. This allows me to do stuff like reading my mail using Thunderbird and browsing the company intranet.
Until now I've been using IE as my default browser, but I've switched to Firebird (for no particular reason except, perhaps, that it's probably slightly less of a security risk, and it conforms more rigidly to W3C standards). However, when plugged in the URL:port for the company intranet, Firebird spat back a terse message saying that that port was blocked for security reasons.
I at first assumed this was ZoneAlarm doing its business. But after digging around in ZoneAlarm and finding no reason why it should be blocking this port on Firebird but not IE, I did a Google search and found the following useful page about Mozilla port blocking:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/PortBanning.html
The port I was using (picked at random) was indeed on the blocked list. I switched ports and it works fine.
Potentially similar posts
- Archived post summaries – June 2011
- Prevent Skype hogging port 80 – June 2011
- Don’t sweat the spelling – they can read it just fine! – June 2010
- Tech writer: a rose by any other name … – June 2010
- About – November 2006
