Firewall Settings

Overview

A firewall is a computer that sits on your local network between your computer and the rest of the machines on the internet. A firewall computer is employed to shield your local network from unauthorized access from outside your network. Not all networks have firewalls, and every firewall is configured to permit certain site specific activities. It shouldn't be surprising therefore that even with a firewall you may not need to enter any firewall specific parameters at all.

Introduction

If you are using a modem or working from home, chances are you do not need to set any firewall parameters. All of the security should be taken care of for you by your internet service provider. On the other hand, if you are connected to a local network which in turn provides internet access, this chapter may be for you.

If you do have a firewall in place, you should contact your network system administrator to find out what information is required to transfer files across the internet.

Firewall Setup

The first step to working with a firewall is to select the Use Firewall check box. This indicates to Get-It that extra steps will be necessary at connection time in order to successfully establish a link. You must mark this check box before you can enter any firewall parameters.

Firewall parameters

Internet connections through a restrictive firewall require not only the connection information for the host machine, but also similar information for the firewall machine. As a reminder, all of this information should be available from your system administrator. A description of these fields follows:

Host name: The host name is the name or IP Address of the firewall machine on your network.
User name: The user name is the name of a valid account containing the appropriate permissions for file transfer on the firewall machine.
Password: The password for the above account on the firewall machine.
Port: The port is a specific location on the firewall machine for handling file transfers. The default port number is 21.

Firewall command

The firewall command is a string that is passed to the firewall machine. It provides information necessary to gain access to the host machine. You may specify the format of this string (the Wingate command for Windows 95 is the default shown), using certain predefined variables that are filled in at connection time. These variables take their values from the information specified under the Establishing a connection panel. Please see your system administrator for the information specific to your firewall.

The variables are:

%h Directs Get-It to substitute in the Host name from the Establishing a connection panel.
%u Directs Get-It to substitute in the User name from the Establishing a connection panel.
%p Directs Get-It to substitute in the Password from the Establishing a connection panel.
%o Directs Get-It to substitute in the FTP port from the Establishing a connection panel.
%% Used if you need to have a '%' character anywhere in the Command string.

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