Dustin Riley

August18th

4 Comments

By default Firefox has some ports blocked to prevent exploits to vulnerable services. This proves problematic if you need to access a site that uses one of these ports. For example, port 6000 is blocked because X11 uses it, but if you had a workstation running VNC’s HTTP server on port 6000 Firefox would block your access.

To unblock a port in Firefox goto about:config in the address bar.

Look for the following key: network.security.ports.banned.override

If the key isn’t present you need to create it. Right-click in the about:config window. You’ll want to click New and the String.

Give it the name of: network.security.ports.banned.override

Give it the value of the port you want to allow such as 6000. If you want to unblock more than one port use a comma to separate the ports.

4 Comments

  • Comment by Sup — August 5, 2009 @ 9:01 pm

    Really worked good article!

  • Comment by Cyril Karpenko — December 9, 2009 @ 8:21 pm

    Thanks you, it’s really help me! =)

  • Comment by GoldenEye — May 24, 2010 @ 4:16 pm

    I wish I could say the same. I setup a special port on our ftp server, port 743, and then used your instruction to override 743. It still hangs when I try to go into that site using port 743. It doesn’t seem to have the problem with the standard port 21. So far, the only browser that doesn’t have a problem with this port is Google Chrome.

  • Comment by Dustin — May 24, 2010 @ 5:16 pm

    Does it actually give a warning in Firefox that the port is blocked? If it doesn’t then this setting won’t apply. If there’s no warning, my guess is that it has something to do with the protocol handler in Firefox limiting itself to ports 20-21. You can get around this by adding two boolean keys to the Firefox config. Adding these keys will pass the ftp server address on to an application such as Explorer or an FTP client of your choice when you visit an FTP server in Firefox. network.protocol-handler.expose.ftp:false and network.protocol-handler.external.ftp:true

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