The assistant creates a fairly conservative firewall, with most incoming traffic denied, and outgoing traffic allowed. After you run the assistant, you can then edit the firewall to customize it for any special needs.
At any point in the future, you can re-run the Assistant to help you set up a firewall setting. |
If you are unsure of whether your address is set manually or automatically, just choose automatically. |
To see a brief description of each service, click on it's name in the list and the description will appear below.
Normally, all of the attempts to access Denied services are lumped together under the default Deny filter. By adding additional Deny filters (for such things as common network attacks and trojan horse programs), you can quickly see if any of these services have been accessed by looking at the Monitor window.
You have now configured and installed your firewall. If you wish to configure the preliminary NAT service, click 'Setup IP Sharing'.
To initially setup IP Sharing, select the way that other local computers are connect to your computer.
Then choose a 'Gateway' address that the other computers should enter in their 'Gateway Router' address setting. This should be an address that is officially defined as 'not route-able', which means that you can't connect to a machine with this address unless it's on the same physical network cable. Using one of the suggested addresses is highly recommended.
IP Sharing in this version is preliminary and experimental. For this reason, there is no feature provided to start up IP Sharing when your Mac boots. You must start and stop it manually. Therefore, if somethings goes completely haywire, rebooting your Mac should restore your computer to a 'normal' state. |