«   |   »

iTunes vs. Firewalls

iTunes on the PC on my desk (notice I feel more possessive of the desk than the PC) hasn’t been able to share music to or from iTunes on my PowerBook. Blame the firewall.

A moment of Googline led me to Travis Saling’s guide to enabling iTunes sharing through a firewall. Here’s the ports that need to be open:

Port 3689 TCP
Port 5353 UDP

However, he notes:

Mac OS X users have it slightly simpler. They only need to allow one port through [port 3689 TCP], for reasons that are unclear to me as yet (I’m guessing the Mac firewall is at least partially stateful, which would explain this).

Posted on Friday, August 20th, 2004 at 1:08 pm in Technology   |  RSS feed

15 Comments to “iTunes vs. Firewalls”

    
  1. gunnar
    December 14, 2004 at 5:52 pm

    Thanks for the infomation! Helped me a lot! :-)

  2. mike
    March 22, 2005 at 9:30 pm

    Can anyone give me like step by step directions on how to open port 3689 tcp because i have no clue.

  4. jack
    August 31, 2005 at 8:18 pm

    this does not help me since i do not have windows firewall enabled

  5. william
    December 8, 2005 at 3:46 pm

    This helped loads (XP user)
    If you are still having probs you should also check norton ‘cus it has a firewall built into it sumwhere which is accessed through options menu, nowhere else

  6. sbastian
    October 4, 2006 at 2:57 pm

    Mike, most likely you don’t want to open TCP 3689. If you have a specific reason, please do let us know.

  7. Darren
    November 28, 2006 at 1:12 pm

    I just got my 2000t and all of my songs are skipping in iTunes, and I cant figure out why. If someone could help me out and tell me how to fix this I would really appreciate it because its driving me crazy. Thanks for the replys.

  8. nancy lavin
    August 1, 2007 at 11:16 am

    I am reading that you helped folks with Port 3689 TCP. i can’t open the shared iTunes with my son. I could before and now I am getting this message:

    The shared library “jwilder’s music” is not accessible for an unknown reason. (-3259)

    Check that any firewall software on either the shared computer or this computer has been set to allow communication on port 3689.

    Can you help?

  9. Jack Eden
    November 2, 2007 at 7:55 pm

    When I disabled one of my anti-spyware programs, Spyware Sweeper, the 3259 error went away.

  10. Adam Whit
    January 13, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    You are my idol! Thank you for this :)

  11. Lord
    January 15, 2008 at 9:31 am

    Not iTunes sharing library.

    Router D-Link DI-624s.
    iMac – LAN to router.
    BookPC – Wi-Fi to router.

    My help.

  12. Liam
    March 23, 2008 at 9:31 am

    worked like a charm thanks

  13. iTunes Music Blog
    November 28, 2008 at 12:17 am

    I cannot say how right you are!!! These other people have failed to see your point. I am going to put a link on my blog back to you ok?

  14. iTunes Music Blog
    December 6, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    Oh man that’s great!!! You’re so right, everyone to date has failed to even see that, kudos!!! I’m going to link to your blog from my site, ok?

  15. Ysabel
    September 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm

    I’m completly lost… How it works??? I just don’t understand what am I supposed to do to “open” this fucking port! Please I’m going mad…

    

User contributed tags for this post: