Firewall: How important?

[g725s]

Just curious how important is using a firewall?

I currently have two Macs where one is a wireless base station using an older mushroom shaped Airport extreme, using a WPA/WPA2 network. Both my Macs have just had a fresh install of 10.6.

Is the firewall important for my home wireless network, or just surfing the internet?

 

[GGJstudios]

You already have a firewall built-in. Yes, a firewall is very important.

 

[electroshock]

Just curious how important is using a firewall?

I currently have two Macs where one is a wireless base station using an older mushroom shaped Airport extreme, using a WPA/WPA2 network. Both my Macs have just had a fresh install of 10.6.

Is the firewall important for my home wireless network, or just surfing the internet?

A properly configured firewall will work both at home and elsewhere. Less risk of forgetting to enable or disable when you have it well-configured.

OS X does come with two firewalls (ipfw and Application FW) built in, but it may or may not be enabled.

There are various firewall config utils but starting with Leopard, OS X's Application Firewall can be configured -- more information here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/131116/2007/12/firewall.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1810

...and various fw apps in general:

http://seaotter.berkeley.edu/cab/mac-firewalls/