Noobie Firewall Query...

B

BillyBoy

Guest
Hi All,

Lost my beloved homebuilt PC to my GF who has hijacked it for video editing. Loving my new iBook G4, bought for e-mail, web-browsing and the occaisonal word processing and excel tomfoolery.

I have two questions. Both my PC and iBook share wireless access through a Linksys router. My PC has Norton antivirus which does an ok job at keeping things clean. My iBook has nothing. Is this ok? I've read aprochryphal stories about the fact that there are no viruses for Macs. I've taken those to be true... are they? Should I have something like Norton on my iBook?

Secondly, I'm sharing my iTunes directory on my PC HD with my iBook through the router. I use WPA-PSK encryption to secure the wireless network. Is file sharing a safe operation given the lack of antivirus/firewall on my iBook? Is this a back door into my PC?

Sorry if these sound a little infantile, just need some straight talking answers and thought this might be the best place for them!

Thanks in advance for the help,

BB :mac:
 
Joined
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Location
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Your Mac's Specs
12" 1Ghz PB 768Mb 10.4.5 30Gb Video iPod 40Gb 3G iPod 1Gb iPod Shuffle
you iBook is already running the inbuilt (and works fine!) firewall

the stories about virii are true (so far!)

as for your wireless LAN and iTunes, i wouldnt worry at all.


Finally welcome to mac forums from someone else in the uk ;)
 
OP
T

Tel

Guest
Good to see more Londoners around :)

Have a look at the firewall in the system preferences and you'll see it actually has quite a lot of decent options etc. you shouldn't need anything else to help protect your iBook. As for antivirus, installing most well know antivirus programs will probably do more harm than good.
 
OP
B

BillyBoy

Guest
Firstly, thanks for the welcome. Good to know that there are some fellow Limeys on this forum!

Secondly, thanks for the advice. I thought that might be the case, but wanted to check all the same.

BB
 

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