Is there an easy firewall for Mountain Lion server? Im amazed Apple took this feature away. For what reason? I dont know command line very well and shouldnt have to learn it seeing as how Macs are supposed to be "user friendly". Doing a port scan I see about 20 ports open that I want to close but just dont know how as they're not application specifc (like pop3...). Any suggestions would be helpful.
thanks.
I meant to say "Is there a GUI for the Firewall for Mountain Lion Server"
Scott Howe wrote:
I meant to say "Is there a GUI for the Firewall for Mountain Lion Server"
I totally agree with you, the whole point of OS X was to be easy to use i.e. GUI based, if we wanted a pure CLI system we would get Linux 🙂
There are actually two different Firewalls on Mountain Lion Server, the 'standard' one you see in System Preferences which is an Application level firewall (ALF), and has extremely limited options but does have a GUI, and the CLI only one which is pfctl (Packet Filtering).
Note: ipfw is depreciated in Mountain Lion.
There is a third-party tool for configuring pfctl called IceFloor. Be careful though, I managed to screw up a system with it, as always make sure you have a backup before making changes.
Thanks! How did you screw things up? Is there no way to turn the rules off r rollback?
Scott Howe wrote:
Thanks! How did you screw things up? Is there no way to turn the rules off r rollback?
I am not sure what cuased it, I was trying to do several things at the same time, I got the impression it was merely installing and rebooting but it might have been linked to the other things I was doing. As long as you have a backup or use a test system then mistakes like these are not a big problem. I was merely emphasising not to do it on your only or live copy.
The Mac did boot afterwards, it was merely that the network connectivity was hosed.
X2 on icefloor
Works well, but the underlying config can be quite complex so be careful.
Firewall gui for Mountain Lion Server
