I have found Freesco's default firewall settings to be secure. Some users may want to make some minor changes.

I ran into a problem when trying to receive files with ICQ. Both my ICQ buddy and I were behind firewalls and the file transfers would not start. ICQ needs a block of 10 for so ip ports opened for file tranfers. ICQ must also be configured to use these assigned ports. I'm sure many other programs also have similar requirements for tcp or udp ports.

Freesco uses the port forwarding command 'ipautofw'

ipautofw -A -r tcp (1st port) (last port) -h (ICQ host ip address)

There is a file called RC_USER on the Freesco floppy disk. Each block of ports is defined by adding a command line between the follwing statements:

if [ "$1" = firewall ]; then

and

exit; fi

For example

ipautofw -A -r tcp 11500 11510 -h 192.168.0.3

udp ports can be entered instead of tcp.

11500 - 11510 is an arbitrary block of numbers that I thought up. IP 192.168.0.3 is the current address of my XP Pro Box. A different block of ports or a different IP will require seperate statement line.

Although Freesco is setup with a DHCP server for the internal network, I have not seen the assigned IP addresses change on the networked computers. I know there's a big leap of faith here so you may want to set up the internal network to static IP addresses.