Firewall collisions on OS X.

[nickcharlton]

This seems to cause all manner of funny behaviour with packer because the OS X firewall objects to processes opening sockets without permission.

So, a couple of issues I've seen:

• Building a Ubuntu box: preseed.cfg isn't provided, so goes straight to user configuration.
• When using the Vagrant post processor, Packer never finishes, leaving you with:

==> Builds finished. The artifacts of successful builds are:

but not actually presenting the results, or exiting.

All of these can be solved by either:

1. Turning off the firewall.
2. Adding exceptions for the packer binaries.

I'm not sure if this should be Packer's issue to solve, but I think it's worthwhile having documented if others find the same thing. Or, possibly Packer should self test and error out?

Sys Info

• Installed through Homebrew (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-binary)
• Packer v0.3.1
• OS X 10.8.4

[mitchellh]

Can you get me a debug log for this? Packer uses a LOT of TCP localhost bound TCP connections, so you need to allow it. But if you deny it, it should properly fail. Unsure why it is continuing.

[nickcharlton]

Yep, here we go: http://git.io/jY2zWA

It took a bit of a while to replicate again reliably (you need to reload the Firewall daemon after changing allowed/blocked settings).

So, to confirm: This is run with the Firewall on, but no Packer related exceptions. Packer will cause the Firewall to confirm you wish it to allow incoming connections (but, only on packer-builder-virtualbox). Then it will generate the box fine, but not exit.

[mitchellh]

Thanks, that is super weird. I'll have to dig into this more to see if I reproduce. Thanks.

[mitchellh]

I can't reproduce this :( Are you able to reproduce issues with basic commands like packer (which uses TCP sockets underneath to talk to subprocesses). Otherwise, can you just give me a set of steps to get this to work?

Sorry.

I'm going to close this for now while I gather more information, I'll continue to get emailnotifications if it changes.

[nickcharlton]

I also cannot replicate it – or at least, I cannot replicate this now I've moved to Packer v0.3.4.

I'll reopen if I see if from now on, but I guess #313 was indeed related.

Thanks!

[mitchellh]

Great!