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Incoming network connection dialogs keep appearing

Amazingly for an OS that markets itself as secure, the firewall in OS X is not switched on by default. So if you switch it to the recommended mode, "Set access for specific services and applications", OS X will prompt you to allow or deny incoming connections.



But sometimes that dialog will not go away! Certain applications such as QmasterStatusMenu.app and Batch Monitor.app cause the dialog to pop up every 5 seconds (or every 20 seconds if you ignore it) which gets annoying very quickly.

The reason for this is that applications like QmasterStatusMenu.app and Batch Monitor.app don't communicate on the same port each time. It is constantly changing, as this log excerpt shows:



This really confuses the very basic OS X firewall.

Some people have recommended switching the firewall off but I wouldn't recommend this. There's always a trade-off between security and convenience, but this trade-off is far too big. Instead, it is much better to just obtain a more advanced firewall.

I would recommend Little Snitch for this job. It gives you infinitely more options than the default firewall, lets you see where apps are sending data, doesn't bug you too often, and most importantly, it copes with applications that constantly change ports so those annoying 5-second popups go away.



The demo gives you full functionality for 3 hours, after which you just restart the firewall again. That's a lot better than popups every 5 seconds, but if 3 hours is too often, you can buy a single license for $29.99.

Just install Little Snitch, restart the computer and switch the default OS X firewall to "Allow all incoming connections". Little Snitch then takes over - you can now use Qmaster and be safe at the same time.