Just curious, what's the benefit of using a custom firewall as per these instructions? Is it more secure than the default firewall?

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A couple of things:

- One thing is layered defenses. Two firewalls are better than one.

- The IPFW firewall does exactly what I tell it to do, not more, not less. Since I submitted this hint I learnt a lot more about the Application Firewall that is build in n Leopard. As seen in numerous reviews it leaves services open that it deems necessary for running the system / run as root.

Therefore it overrules my decisions. Something that reminds me on Windows. I don't like to be overruled by my own computer....

- Also it looks like the Application Firewall seems to be more like a proxy firewall. This maybe means that it's more vulnerable to attack since the packet has to travel up the TCP/IP stack before it gets processed by the Application Firewall. IPFW is a simple packet filter that sits on Layer 3 and therefore doesn't interfere with the Application Firewall.



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Okay, thanks!

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