Flying Buttress 1.4 review
DownloadFlying Buttress is designed to make using the network firewall built in to Mac OS X quick and easy.
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Flying Buttress 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.
Flying Buttress 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.
That's where Flying Buttress comes in. Flying Buttress provides a simple and easy interface to setting and activating your firewall's filters. It also includes a firewall monitor window to allow you to see how often each filter is used.
Filter settings can be saved and switched quickly, and imported and exported to and from disk. Settings can be created by knowledgeable users and admins, and distributed to others to disable specific or recently discovered attack.
Here are some key features of "Flying Buttress":
Firewall filters that include qualifiers on host or network addresses
Firewall filters that operate on other than TCP or UDP protocols
Firewall filters that include the whole range of ipfw qualifiers, such as IP options, ICMP types or TCP flags
Per-filter logging configuration, including the ability to log allowed connections and the option to not log certain types of denied connections
NAT port forwarding or other custom NAT configuration
Different filter configurations on different network interfaces.
A persistant, searchable firewall log entry database with graphical log viewer
Scriptable control of your firewall, such as via cron or other shell automation
Access and ability to easily edit the raw firewall configuration text, including an integrated ipfw filter syntax checker.
The ability to switch between different firewall configuration sets quickly and easily.
What's New:
Changed name to Flying Buttress
Fixed startup item issue under 10.3.9 or higher.
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