Score one for the Mac
Posted on:: November 22nd, 2005
This morning, I was expecting a Skype call. Ten minutes before, I started up my PC (we had an outage overnight). All was fine except Skype didn’t recognize the skype name of the person who was going to call me. Odd. So, I downloaded and installed Skype on the Mac, and it worked immediately.
On the one hand, this was probably a firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro) issue on my PC. On the other hand, I don’t seem to have firewall problems on my Mac. I don’t even know if I have a firewall on my Mac, which is how it should be. [Tags: mac macintosh skype]
By coincidence, in order to log onto the Harvard network, I’ve had to turn on my firewall, and thus have discovered where it lives on the Mac.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
OS X Firewall: System Preferences > Sharing > Firewall Tab. One click to start or stop, check boxes for the most common ports to open/close, and easy custom port opening.
“I don’t even know if I have a firewall on my Mac, which is how it should be”
*splutters*
do you really mean that? I’m all for it Just Working, but that doesn’t include having no idea how exposed your computer is!
Fair enough. Let me amend: The firewall should (ideally) work with a minimum of user interaction. I spend a lot of time tuning my Zone Alarm firewall on my PC. It defaults to constantly interrupting with notices and warnings.
I’m all for getting the defaults right.