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I no longer blindly trust the numerous connections that occur at night and during the day that always go to "content" and "push" servers like:

a23-33-37-54.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com
st11p01st-courier001-bz.push.apple.com
ve-in-f113.1e100.net

These always happen at night when no one is using the computer. I do not have iCloud enabled.

So I would like to block these. Is there an effective way to do that?

I tried setting these as keywords to block in my wifi router that that doesn't seem to work, perhaps because these sites are not being accessed by a browser.

 127.0.0.1 1e100.net

However this will not block direct access to an IP address e.g. https get from 173.194.75.113:443.

How can I block an IP range?

Thanks for any clues.

share|improve this question
There are probably hundreds of Akamai / Apple push servers. You'd need a hosts entry for each. You're better off with a firewall that can block by wildcard, e.g. *.deploy.akamaitechnologies. With a decent firewall you should also be able to set additional rule options, such as the time ranges that they're enabled. – Polynomial Sep 10 '12 at 9:02
Right but this line added to /etc/hosts should also work: 127.0.0.1 deploy.akamaitechnologies.com. – Mithras Sep 10 '12 at 9:04
It won't, since it'll only prevent you from resolving that specific server, rather than subdomains. For example, adding 127.0.0.1 google.com to /etc/hosts doesn't block mail.google.com. – Polynomial Sep 10 '12 at 9:52
It appears ipfw is still included with OS/X, so I'll use that. But it's deprecated. – Mithras Sep 10 '12 at 13:19
Also, oddly enough the firewall rule for Apple's push server is being ignored... – Mithras Sep 10 '12 at 13:33

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Use LittleSnitch to restrict what services applications can access, without having to manually list the thousands of servers owned by each of these CDNs. As a bonus, you can specify the rules by application, allowing for a much greater degree of control over who uses what.

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How can I trust that LittleSnitch does not contain spyware? – Mithras Sep 10 '12 at 13:18
up vote 0 down vote

The solution is to use the ipfw command, which configures that firewall.

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3  
Care to give any more detail? – Iszi Sep 10 '12 at 15:51

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