Friday, January 17, 2020
Mysterious packets in the night
For about a decade,
I've been monitoring syslog traffic
in real time.
It makes for an interesting background screen.
For instance,
I've noticed over the years Mac OS-X getting more and more paranoid about running executables.
that one UPS needs a new battery,
and just how many DNS requests Firefox makes.
Just stuff I notice out of the corner of my eye.
So it was rather alarming when I just saw the following pop out:
iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 140 connectx to 2600:1403:b:19a::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 140 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1a8::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 140 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1ab::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 140 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1ac::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 140 connectx to 2600:1403:b:185::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 141 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1ac::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 141 connectx to 2600:1403:b:185::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 141 connectx to 2600:1403:b:19a::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 141 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1a8::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 141 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1ab::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 143 connectx to 2600:1403:b:188::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 143 connectx to 2600:1403:b:18c::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 143 connectx to 2600:1403:b:18d::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 143 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1a1::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host iTunes tcp_connection_destination_perform_socket_connect 143 connectx to 2600:1403:b:1ad::2a1.443@0 failed: [65] No route to host
Now, I have IPv6 enabled on my Mac to play around with the technology, but my main connection out to the Intarwebs is still plain IPv4. So that explains the error. But the question is why is iTunes trying to connect to some machine on the Intarwebs? I have iTunes running, but doing nothing at the moment.
So then I look into that IPv6 address. First, it's assigned to Europe, which is odd, because I'm not in Europe. Second, it seems it belongs to Akamai Technologies. So the bigger question now is, what is iTunes trying to get from Europe? Is my computer trying to snitch on me? Checking for updates? Is iTunes feeling neglected?
I don't know … and that is bothering me.
