[X4U] Bonjour browsing and Safari oddness

[Norman Cohen]

Hi,

Thought I'd share something a bit odd. I'm running 10.4.2 and have  
Personal Web Sharing turned on. Using Safari, I was trying to open a  
personal web page listed under the Bonjour menu on the Bookmarks Bar.  
The page would take forever to open in Safari; however, it would open  
fairly quickly in Firefox with the bonjour assigned name. The page  
would open quickly in Safari when using my router assigned IP as part  
of the URL or when using localhost or 127.0.0.1 as the address. I  
tried this on a second account with the same results and tried to  
browse to my computer from another computer on my LAN also with the  
same results. I could open my Rendezvour/Bonjour enabled Brother  
printers page quickly.

So I started troubleshooting, including turning web sharing off and  
on, rebooting, clearing web caches, clearing all caches, checking  
status of my webserver config file, adjusted my router's setting,  
rebooted my router, etc. etc.

Then a little red light went on and I went to the Firewall settings  
for my computer. At some point, I turned on "stealth" mode. Don't  
know why I did that. Once I turned that setting off, Bonjour browsing  
with Safari returned to normal speed.

Lessons learned -
1) Don't turn on non-default settings that you either don't really  
need or don't fully understand;
2) Never underestimate the problem of unintended consequences.

Norm
---
Norman A. Cohen
nacohen at mac.com

"I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those  
with the most opinions often have the fewest facts."
Bethania McKenstry