Flying Buttress

Flying Buttress is an excellent software that is designed to make using the network firewall built into Mac OS X a breeze. BrickHouse is used to enable your computer's firewall, thereby preventing unauthorized individuals from gaining access to your computer via your internet connection. With Flying Buttress, you can use your firewall to guard against denial of service or resource-based internet attacks. This means that network attacks will bounce off the firewall, preventing your computer from slowing down or crashing.

While Mac OS X is fairly secure upon installation, it also includes a powerful network traffic filter that can prevent break-in attempts and keep your computer from being used in attacks on other computers. Unfortunately, the default installation leaves it wide open, and you must manually 'add rules' or filters using a command line tool called ipfw, requiring the use of Terminal.app. Not everyone is familiar with using command lines, which is where Flying Buttress comes in. It provides a simple and easy interface to setting and activating your firewall's filters without requiring any technical expertise.

Flying Buttress includes a firewall monitor window that allows 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. Knowledgeable users and admins can create settings that can then be distributed to others to disable specific or recently discovered attacks.

The software's key features include 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. It also has Per-filter logging configuration, including the ability to log allowed connections, NAT port forwarding, or other custom NAT configuration.

There are different filter configurations on different network interfaces, a persistent, searchable firewall log entry database with a graphical log viewer, scriptable control of your firewall, such as via cron or other shell automation. It also has access and the ability to easily edit the raw firewall configuration text, including an integrated ipfw filter syntax checker. You can switch between different firewall configuration sets quickly and easily.

In this release, the name has been changed to Flying Buttress, and the startup item issue under 10.3.9 or higher has been fixed. Overall, Flying Buttress is a reliable and user-friendly software that guarantees the safety and security of your computer while using the internet.