Setup Assistant

Running the Setup Assistant

BrickHouse includes a Setup Assistant to help you configure your firewall as quickly as possible. When you first start the program, the Setup Assistant will help you initially configure your firewall.

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.

External Network

First, the Assistant needs to know how you connect to the internet. In addition to the protocol used to connect, the Assistant also needs to know whether you have a manually-set, static internet address, or a dynamically assigned one that changes each time you restart.
If you are unsure of whether your address is set manually or automatically, just choose automatically.

Allowed Incoming Traffic

The Setup Assistant will ask you to choose any services to allow to the outside world. If you have enabled WebSharing, for example, you should select 'World Wide Web' from the Allowed list. Other common services you may wish to allow include IRC and Secure Shell (SSH).

To see a brief description of each service, click on it's name in the list and the description will appear below.

Denied Incoming Traffic

While the Setup Assistant denies all incoming traffic by default, you may wish to include some additional Deny rules to get finer grained logging results.

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.

Installing the Firewall

Finally, the Setup Assistant will automatically save the firewall setting you've just created, and provide you with an opportunity to apply the new firewall immediately. You may also install the firewall startup script so that your firewall setting is automatically installed when you restart your Mac.

You have now configured and installed your firewall. If you wish to configure the preliminary NAT service, click 'Setup IP Sharing'.

Setup IP Sharing

BrickHouse includes a preliminary interface for controlling MacOS X's built-in IP Sharing abilities. IP Sharing allows a single computer to connect to the internet, and then share that internet connection with other computers on the same local network.

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.
 
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