BrickHouse is designed to make using the network firewall built in to Mac OS X quick and easy. By using BrickHouse to enable your computer's firewall, you can help prevent unauthorized villians from gaining access to your computer via your internet connection. It also helps you use your firewall to guard against denial of service or resource-based internet attacks. Network attacks will bounce off the firewall to prevent your computer from slowing down or crashing. While Mac OS X is fairly secure as installed, it also includes a powerful network traffic filter or firewall that can both prevent break-in attempts and keep your computer from being used in attack on another computer. Unfortunately, the default installation leaves it wide open, and you must manually 'add rules' or filters using a command line tool called ipfw. You need to use Terminal.app to do this. My mom isn't going to be able to do this. What's New: Version 1.2b12: I fixed the worst, stupid bug in 1.2b11 that disallowed saving unless you'd previously run 1.2b10 or earlier. Doh! Also, several minor differences in the way Panther logged firewall entries were accounted for so that the Log window should now work on both 10.2 and 10.3. The hunt for the 'start IP sharing' issue continues (as described in the Read Me document for 1.2b10, which should be included in this distribution). If you have trouble with the built in 'Start IP Sharing' functionality, use the enclosed AppleScript application to start IP sharing if you hadn't at startup or need to restart it. Stopping it within the BrickHouse program works fine for everyone. I haven't been able to verify this that problem still exists on Panther (ie., using Panther as the NAT server). Other than that, this version was tested on Panther, and should be fully functional. Finally, I apologize for the tardiness of this beta update. Sometimes Life gets in the way, as they say.  |  |
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