Safari 4 vs a Netgear router: Safari won.

It's true, I am am a technical magpie. I can't help but gather shiny new things. To put on my shiny MacBook Pro, Apple recently released a shiny new version of Safari.

Well, Safari 4 is technically a beta, but it's shiny and new so I just had to download and install it. Must... click... install...

Most people seem to think Safari 4 is marvelous, when they're not arguing over the position of the tabs (tabs in the title bar, that's heresy!). And indeed, it is. It's quite fast, and the new pretty shiny things it provides are both pretty and shiny. If idiots can't find where they've hidden the "stop" and "reload" buttons, then it serves them right. All good stuff.

Almost.

Sadly, Safari 4 has lead to a networking fiasco chez Goodliffe. After a few minutes of Safari use, my laptop now stops accessing the internet. Well, at least it fails to complete any http or rtsp traffic. Pinging IP addresses works OK, and my VPN connection can be started and stopped (the VPN connection uses a fixed IP address). DNS lookups also fail. Traceroutes work.

It's taken me ages to track down the problem. I discovered that my trusty Netgear FWG114P wireless router is a feature-packed network device that can insulate me from networking problems. Including denial of service attacks perpetrated by Safari on my laptop... Safari 4's speedy page fetching provokes the router into thinking it's a hacker's SYN flood. The computer is ceremonially booted from the network for a while as penance.

The solution, if you suffer this problem, is to go to the Rules page on the router's web-based admin interface, and disable Block TCP flood and Block UDP flood. Then hope that this is something Apple will fix, and you'll remember to switch the features back on next time.

That's a short description of a problem that's taken me ages to track down and sort out.

Apples, eh? They Just Work.