Maybe scroll down to the 7th and final paragraph below beause i buried the lede and was writing like a chatGPT. at the I love computers and am fairly adept at troubleshooting issues that pop up, except when it comes to networking problems, which must be like in the lowest rings of Dante's hell and outside my bailiwick as people are supposed to have said back in The Day. But I digest. Here's my issue

I have two macs on my home network, they both use my wifi provided by an Xfinity gateway (a new one actually, an upgrade) located in the same room as the computers. Both macs are running the same version of MacOS which is the latest one: Sonoma 14.2.1.

One of these macs is a 2018 era MacBook Air, which at this point runs really slow and I probably shouldn't be attempting to run Sonoma on it at all because that OS is super graphics intensive and now my laptop is even slower but it is what it is. Macbook air has an intel chipset.

The other Mac is a several month old Mac Mini, running same OS, but is much more capable and faster than the Macbook Air obviously, especially as it's using Apple silicon the M2 chip that's crazy fast except don't buy the cheapest model with only 8gb memory you need more so don't listen to apple's bull about their memory really can't be compared to pc memory because it's more efficient etc. WRONG you need more than 8gb so shut ur pie hole. That's my one complaint about the Mini.

These two computers were networked together "before" quite easily, I just can't tell you when that was precisely so I can't pinpoint the changes that might be responsible but them not talking anymore but I think it started around the time I got the new gateway. My setup is that my mac mini, being more stationary and having more ports, is like a hub for other peripherals: hard drives, my printer, stuff like that. I have printer sharing turned on and my macbook air can print to the printer connected to the mac mini quite easily. I want the macbook air to do Time Machine backups from a Mac Mini external hard drive as well. Had this all set up and it was working flawlessly, then just stopped working and i don't know why.

OK so we're getting to the interesting stuff, the mystery stuff. I'm checking my settings on both computers and I notice that the network settings on my macbook air don't match those on my mac mini. Specifically, the macbook air is using a proxy server to access the gateway, 127.0.0.1 port 48100. No such settings turned on on my mac mini. Both computers use the internet just fine. Both computers run avast security which i do think sets up a proxy but why would settings not match on the computer and would it explain why my mac mini can network to my macbook air and access all its files but my macbook air cant do the same to my mac mini as if it's being blocked by the firewall or something (it's not). Someone help explain how this could happen or how i could troubleshoot it. Conspiracy theories aren't often helpful but are entertaining to have at it.

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