1.74 upgrade confuses Little Snitch?

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brank
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Jun 07, 2009 3:19 pm

1.74 upgrade confuses Little Snitch?

Post by brank »

I upgraded to 1.74 earlier today and walked away. I didn't notice at the time that all traffic had stopped, and Transmission had apparently frozen. When I came back I had to force quit it, relaunch (it froze again), force quit again, then launched and immediately paused it. I removed the torrents I no longer needed to seed, thinking maybe I'd just overwhelmed it (or the tracker, possibly), and resumed. Immediately Little Snitch hit me with window after window for something called """" (four quotation marks) wanting access to various ports and servers and the like. I OK'd them as they came though, but traffic didn't resume.

I removed 1.74 and replaced it with 1.54 from the Past Versions page, and everything worked exactly as it had pre-upgrade. Has anyone else had problems with traffic dying immediately or soon after upgrading to 1.74? I see there's a locked thread (No downloads will start!), but consensus there seems to be it was a tracker issue. I'm not downloading anything from that tracker, so I'm wondering if it was really that.

15" Macbook Pro
Mac OS X 10.5.7
2.16 GHz Intel 2 Duo
3 GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
BrianStegner
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Aug 29, 2009 1:34 am

Re: 1.74 upgrade confuses Little Snitch?

Post by BrianStegner »

Transmission is a serious security risk. Even with zero torrent files, and obviously none "active" it keeps a constants input/output chatter with IPs around the World. Check out the Little snitch network activity window whenever Transmission is launched, when you have no torrents running or even listed on your Mac. See what I mean? terrible, these guys are amateurs, no question about it.
Jordan
Transmission Developer
Posts: 2312
Joined: Sat May 26, 2007 3:39 pm
Location: Titania's Room

Re: 1.74 upgrade confuses Little Snitch?

Post by Jordan »

BrianStegner wrote:Transmission is a serious security risk. Even with zero torrent files, and obviously none "active" it keeps a constants input/output chatter with IPs around the World. Check out the Little snitch network activity window whenever Transmission is launched, when you have no torrents running or even listed on your Mac. See what I mean? terrible, these guys are amateurs, no question about it.
Rather than throwing out misinformation, you'd be better off asking for better information.
  1. When you start a torrent, you make a connection to the tracker and tell it that you're ready for some p2p.
  2. The tracker responds back with a list of some of the other IP addresses that are (hopefully) interested in sharing
  3. The tracker adds you to the list, so that it can tell other peers that you're (hopefully) interested in sharing
  4. Every 30 or 45 minutes or so -- the precise interval is set by the tracker -- you "check in" with the tracker, telling it how much you uploaded and downloaded, and getting a fresh list of some of the other IP addresses.
  5. In "public" torrents, these IP address lists are shared with other peers periodically too.
  6. These IP address lists are almost always subsets, so to increase the odds of finding The Right Peers, torrent clients will merge these lists together (typically giving higher priority to lists from trackers, than lists from peers, because they're more likely to have newer addresses). Torrent clients typically don't remove IP addresses unless the client knows from firsthand experience that the address in question isn't working.
The rest should be obvious: BitTorrent has a couple of mechanisms for adding your IP address to other peers' TODO lists, but no mechanism to remove it. (And if there was one -- that would be a security hole exploited by swarm-poisoning bots) So even after you stop your torrent, other peers in the swarm will still keep ringing you up. That's the traffic you're seeing. Transmission answers the phone, listens long enough to hear that it's not interested in what the caller has to offer, and disconnects.

Transmission's source code has been publicly available for years. If you think we're putting in some kind of shady network traffic code, you are wrong.
brank
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Jun 07, 2009 3:19 pm

Re: 1.74 upgrade confuses Little Snitch?

Post by brank »

I upgraded to 1.75 and the same thing happened again. Looks like I'll be sticking with 1.54.
tariq
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2009 6:38 pm

Re: 1.74 upgrade confuses Little Snitch?

Post by tariq »

i have this problem too :(

1.54 works fine, but anything more recent seems to "confuse little snitch" and there is zero activity. if you remove transmission rules within little snitch and install a recent version of transmission, little snitch doesn't seem to be able to pick up on transmission's network activity (in order to prompt to allow/disallow the traffic)

only thing that works is to disable little snitch entirely which is hardly a suitable solution.
what's the problem? little snitch or transmission?
tariq
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2009 6:38 pm

Re: 1.74 upgrade confuses Little Snitch?

Post by tariq »

ok seems the issue was with little snitch. i was running version 2.04 and upgraded to the latest version 2.2
everything a-ok after the upgrade. hope that helps anyone else that runs into this issue
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