Re: Firewall in OSX Leopard

<jdr.smith@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hmm...

Should the firewall be turned off ?

I'm on my LAN at home behind a hardware firewall with SPI.

That said I'm running a local software firewall on all my Windows PC's

What's the score regards malware and viruses etc etc, should I load up
some antivirus software ?

You can if you want, but I don't myself, there basically aren't any such
beasties out there worth worrying about for Mac OSX. The only 'viruses'
there are require you to manually download them, and go through your own
security routines in order to run them.

However, it can be handy to prevent passing them onto the Windows boxes
if you share any files. ClamXav is an open source (free) virus software,
and is OK, although it can cause slowdowns at times.

There are a few commercial ones too - Intego, Norton Virex, and Sophos
all do one. However, some of these have been known to propgate their own
virus scares in order to boost sales.

As for the Firewall, I have mine switched off, both on the Macs and the
PC, as I'm behind a standard NAT broadband router with its own Firewall.

--
Andy Hewitt
<http://web.mac.com/andrewhewitt1/>
.

Relevant Pages

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