PostgreSQL related problem on iMac

Good afternoon Neil:

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 11:31 AM, Neil Marshall <nwmarshall@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a small notification pane which appears randomly, in the same position every time, towards the top of my iMac 27" (2009) screen in the midline.
It first occurred after the recent MacOS Sierra upgrade. The pane is on screen for less than a second each time, sometimes it is very brief, and is about whether to allow or deny Postgre to access incoming content (or something of the sort!).

If it is about incoming CONNECTION it may be firewall/antivirus
related ( I do not own a Mac and do not know whether they have this
kind of things like the recents windows have, I just use Linux and
BSDs ).

There is no knowing when it will appear. I have actually succeeded in clicking on it a couple of times but it still comes back - randomly throughout every computer session. If I am typing when it appears it can induce typing errors.
'Apple help’ did not know about this issue. They advised a scan with malwarebytes but this did not help.

If it says connection AND you are not expecting INCOMING connections
when it appear, something may be scanning your machine, or trying t do
it.

I uninstalled Postgre from the iMac as I could not see that I would have a use for it but that did not help either.
I would very much like to be rid of this problem.

It does not seem postgres related, and certainly not a postgres bug.
It seems more like a mac related problem. The fact it started
appearing after an upgrade of the OS also points there. If I where in
your situation I would check whether the upgraded added some new
firewalling/connection control functionality.

In fact, your assertion that the problem still persist after you
uninstalled postgres certainly makes the not postgres related more
plausible. Bear in mind that your Mac may say postgres for other
reasons. I.e, my machine has this entries:

postgresql 5432/tcp # POSTGRES
postgresql 5432/udp

in the services files ( which is used to translate port numbers to
service names, like

http 80/tcp www www-http # World Wide Web HTTP
https 443/tcp # MCom

So any non numeric traffic dump of packets using port 5432 gets
labelled as postgres, even if postgres is not installed.

Francisco Olarte.

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Neil Marshall <nwmarshall@gmail.com> writes:

I have a small notification pane which appears randomly, in the same position every time, towards the top of my iMac 27" (2009) screen in the midline.
It first occurred after the recent MacOS Sierra upgrade. The pane is on screen for less than a second each time, sometimes it is very brief, and is about whether to allow or deny Postgre to access incoming content (or something of the sort!). There is no knowing when it will appear. I have actually succeeded in clicking on it a couple of times but it still comes back - randomly throughout every computer session. If I am typing when it appears it can induce typing errors.
'Apple help’ did not know about this issue. They advised a scan with malwarebytes but this did not help.
I uninstalled Postgre from the iMac as I could not see that I would have a use for it but that did not help either.

This sounds suspiciously like the problems some of us saw a year or two
back with "accept incoming network connections" prompts on machines that
weren't actually configured to allow any incoming connections. The answer
turned out to be that some OSX versions put

fe80::1%lo0 localhost

into /etc/hosts, which is wrong because it's not really a local address.
So when the postmaster tried to bind to localhost, the firewall quite
correctly saw that as an externally exposed address.

In short, if you see a line like that in /etc/hosts, it's wrong and
you should remove it.

I'm not real sure why this problem would suddenly appear with Sierra
though. It was current a couple years ago but I thought Apple had
fixed it by now. Maybe your issue is something else, but I don't
have enough info to speculate.

regards, tom lane

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