Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 14. Firewall Service

In This Chapter

• Introduction to firewalls

• Planning

• firewall services

• Firewall setup and

• configuration

• Managing and

• monitoring

• firewall services

The firewall service in Mac OS X Server erects a checkpoint barrier to prevent unintended network communications from attacking the server and potentially other machines on the network to obtain private information, maliciously interrupt network services, or use network resources for undesirable purposes.

Apart from the firewall, Snow Leopard Server incorporates a variety of security practices to harden the software from external attacks. Most modern network services require authentication before allowing any communications that could expose any vulnerabilities; and those that don't, such as publicly accessible web services, greatly limit external interaction to specific interfaces that behave in known ways.

Still, the best way to defend against external attacks is to proactively stop them before they can gain access to the network or server. This is the role of the firewall service.

Smaller groups operating Snow Leopard Server in a standard or workgroup configuration are likely to already have some firewall protection in place, supplied either by an appliance router, such as an AirPort base station, or by the organization's firewall installed at the router on the boundary of the public Internet.

Server Preferences enables users to remotely set up firewall services in the AirPort base station or, alternatively, to configure ...