Re: PostgreSQL related problem on iMac

Neil Marshall <nwmarshall(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I have a small notification pane which appears randomly, in the same position every time, towards the top of my iMac 27" (2009) screen in the midline.
> It first occurred after the recent MacOS Sierra upgrade. The pane is on screen for less than a second each time, sometimes it is very brief, and is about whether to allow or deny Postgre to access incoming content (or something of the sort!). There is no knowing when it will appear. I have actually succeeded in clicking on it a couple of times but it still comes back - randomly throughout every computer session. If I am typing when it appears it can induce typing errors.
> 'Apple help’ did not know about this issue. They advised a scan with malwarebytes but this did not help.
> I uninstalled Postgre from the iMac as I could not see that I would have a use for it but that did not help either.

This sounds suspiciously like the problems some of us saw a year or two
back with "accept incoming network connections" prompts on machines that
weren't actually configured to allow any incoming connections. The answer
turned out to be that some OSX versions put

fe80::1%lo0 localhost

into /etc/hosts, which is wrong because it's not really a local address.
So when the postmaster tried to bind to localhost, the firewall quite
correctly saw that as an externally exposed address.

In short, if you see a line like that in /etc/hosts, it's wrong and
you should remove it.

I'm not real sure why this problem would suddenly appear with Sierra
though. It was current a couple years ago but I thought Apple had
fixed it by now. Maybe your issue is something else, but I don't
have enough info to speculate.

regards, tom lane