Hey gang, I wonder if any of you are familiar with the program "WaterRoof?" It "is an IPFW firewall frontend for Mac OS X." Website Anyway, I want to set WaterRoof up to allow communications with my AppleTV while, at the same time, being fairly locked down. I know hanyet has a "noob" program that is easier to use but it just doesn't offer the features I need (specifically blocking access to specific websites). Any help out there?

Cheers

Ever listen to Security Now! ? It's somewhat Windows focused but one of the things they mention frequently is that software firewalls really aren't much good and, like anti-virus programs, suck up CPU cycles. You're much better off using a router so you have a hardware firewall.

thanks?

I use a linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT on it. Creating a firewall that suits my needs on it is slightly outside my knowledge base.

I haven't used Waterroof, but I have used IPFW directly.

How "precise" do you want to be? Depends on whether you are worried about intrusions from others on your local network.

If you create a new rule in Waterroof to allow TCP and UDP to and from 192.168.0.0/24, that will open your Mac up to communicating with anything on your local network. ("192.168.0.0/24" is based on your use of the LinkSys router to assign DHCP addresses in its default IP adress range.)

If you can set your AppleTV to use a Static IP address ("Configure Manually" instead of setting it to use DHCP) then you can set the allowed IP address ("192.168.0.0/24") to exactly your AppleTV (e.g. set your AppleTV's IP address to "192.168.0.88" and then set Waterroof to allow TCP and UDP to/from 192.168.0.88, too. Any IP address within your LinkSys's netmask and outside it's DHCP range will do.)

Note your LinkSys router, in its default config, provides a pretty fair external firewall to protect your home network from the internet outside, just because it uses NAT. You'd have to open up the LinkSys's Port Forwarding (or be targetted by very sophisticated attackers) to worry much about the outside world on the LAN side of your router.