Seriously, the firewall in Panther (and Jaguar) is ipfw, a robust and battle-tested firewall from BSD Unix, with a nice GUI over the top. The simple settings you can set in the System Prefs panel will get you at least 'standard' protection, such as blocking all ports but just the ones you want everyone to have access to.
For more complex settings, such as 'block everyone on this port unless they're this specific machine at work' you'll want to grab a configuring utility such as BrickHouse. Note that tools like this just let you have more flexible control over the built-in ipfw, they don't add anything new but an easy to use GUI over the top of the existing tool.
OTOH, if you've ever hand-rolled ipfw rulesets, you'll appreciate the GUI a *lot*.
Once you turn on even the basic firewall, I'd be more concerned about the WiFi base station than anything. Be sure to turn on whatever protection you can there as well.
It's very secure. There are no known vulnerabilities or exploits for it. It uses the same IPFW software from FreeBSD.
I'm not satisfied, though, with the options in System Preferences. The firewall is far more advanced than that leads you to believe. You can configure more options from the command line or you can use a third party tool like BrickHouse. I personally use BrickHouse. It's the best out there, but it has a few bugs with Panther. The developer is aware of this and working on a new release.
the wifi router i set up at home doesn't have much range once i step outside. i forgot how to go through the security features, i remember i had problems with it so i turned it off. i mean, if the range ends outside my walls, it should be ok, right?
Comments
Seriously, the firewall in Panther (and Jaguar) is ipfw, a robust and battle-tested firewall from BSD Unix, with a nice GUI over the top. The simple settings you can set in the System Prefs panel will get you at least 'standard' protection, such as blocking all ports but just the ones you want everyone to have access to.
For more complex settings, such as 'block everyone on this port unless they're this specific machine at work' you'll want to grab a configuring utility such as BrickHouse. Note that tools like this just let you have more flexible control over the built-in ipfw, they don't add anything new but an easy to use GUI over the top of the existing tool.
OTOH, if you've ever hand-rolled ipfw rulesets, you'll appreciate the GUI a *lot*.
Once you turn on even the basic firewall, I'd be more concerned about the WiFi base station than anything. Be sure to turn on whatever protection you can there as well.
I'm not satisfied, though, with the options in System Preferences. The firewall is far more advanced than that leads you to believe. You can configure more options from the command line or you can use a third party tool like BrickHouse. I personally use BrickHouse. It's the best out there, but it has a few bugs with Panther. The developer is aware of this and working on a new release.