On Friday, December 12, 2003, at 11:08 PM, Robert Eye wrote:
Well, using Version Tracker (http://www.versiontracker.com/macos) I found:
Intego NetBarrier (commercial), which has gotten some good reviews in the Mac press.
IPNetRouter, which can be set up as a firewall (but does a whole lot more than you probably need).
IPNetSentry (at $40 it might be a good deal).
That's about it. There are likely more clients available, but I am not aware of them. I look forward to more replies to this thread.
The last time I remember looking and reviewing and reading newsgroups, consensus was that for MacOS less than X, there's not much point to a software firewall for Macs. Yah places sell them but I'm not sure they are needed for your situation.
There's no root shell for anyone to gain access to, if you have file sharing off there is no open port for people to try and get into, even with file sharing on it's not very hackable, it's not like OS X or a Windows machine. You could disable "ping" replies with a software firewall (should be able to anyway, but I've not looked into the capabilities of the Mac software firewalls) but last I read Apple fixed the ICMP ping bug, and I think you need Linux to be free of SYN flood vulnerability (and realistically no one is going to be bothering you with that).
The only benefit to a firewall at your university with your 3400 that I can think of, would be that if you get a hardware firewall you could hook up more computers to the school network (sometimes the schools are fussy about people using hubs, if you put up a router/firewall you can run multiple computers behind it and it's a little more work for them to see that you have ore than one computer per jack (they still can tell if they wish, though). And that could be done in software with IPNEtRouter sure but that software can be a pain and costs more than a hardware router/firewall on sale. And you'd need two ethernet cards at least.
Personally, with a OS 9.2 or earlier machine, I see no point to a software firewall. On a univ network, any Win95 or higher, or unix box, would NEED one for sure. I've fixed a friend's Win98 machine that got hacked into just being on the university MODEM pool 30 min each day, for crissake.
HTH-
B
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