Port Forwarding on Macbook Pro

System Preferences>Sharing>Firewall. Click on New. Click on Other. Name the service and put in the values of the ports.

It has been moved from the place the prior poster described it. Look in:

System Preferences>Security>Firewall

drsailer... Thanks for that. I am not running Leopard, so I see they changed the location.

Worse yet, Leopard now comes with a newfangled application firewall with very limited user interaction and will definitely not do the port forwarding requested.

The FreeBSD ipfw we were accustomed to in Tiger is still there, but set with a single "default allow" rule and totally inaccesible from System Preferences. Nowadays, the only way to do fancy stuff such as port forwarding, NAT, bandwith control and the like is either by manually munging the config files in Terminal or using the [WaterRoof utility|http://www.hanynet.com/waterroof>. Note that either method presumes an extensive knowledge of ipfw's workings.

Courcoul... That is worse. Thanks for the heads up.

Use ssh in Terminal, or one of these utilities...

http://www.apple.com/search/downloads/?q=ssh

this maps a local port on the Mac to a remote port on another computer. I don't think this will quicken the connection, it mainly serves as an alias to the remote machine using a local port. Is that what you were trying to do?

One advantage is the security aspect if you are on an open WiFi network, the network traffic can be secure through the ssh tunnel, where if you connected directly over the open WiFi communication could be vulnerable to packet-sniffers potentially.