in reply to Mac FTP/Firewall security question...

I'm using linux, and my firewall script needs to specify how to use the "high-ports" when using active ftp. This is part of the configuration file from the SuSE-firewall2 scripts. You need to figure out how to make your firewall handle incoming high ports, for established ftp connections.
# 11.) # How is access allowed to high (unpriviliged [above 1023]) ports? # # You may either allow everyone from anyport access to your highports +("yes"), # disallow anyone ("no"), anyone who comes from a defined port (portnu +mber or # known portname) [note that this is easy to circumvent!], or just you +r # defined nameservers ("DNS"). # Note that if you want to use normal (active) ftp, you have to set th +e TCP # option to ftp-data. If you use passive ftp, you don't need that. # Note that you can't use rpc requests (e.g. rpcinfo, showmount) as ro +ot # from a firewall using this script (well, you can if you include rang +e # 600:1023 in FW_SERVICES_EXT_UDP ...). # # Choice: "yes", "no", "DNS", portnumber or known portname, defaults t +o "no" # if not set # # Common: "ftp-data", better is "yes" to be sure that everything else +works :-( FW_ALLOW_INCOMING_HIGHPORTS_TCP="ftp-data"
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and the firewall control bash script uses the above with

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for j in $FW_ALLOW_INCOMING_HIGHPORTS_TCP; do case "$j" in no) ;; yes) for CHAIN in input_int input_dmz input_ext; do $LAC $IPTABLES -A $CHAIN -j LOG ${LOG}-ACCEPT -p t +cp --dport 1024:65535 --syn $LAA $IPTABLES -A $CHAIN -j LOG ${LOG}-ACCEPT -p t +cp --dport 1024:65535 $IPTABLES -A $CHAIN -j "$ACCEPT" -m state --state +NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED -p done DONE_ALL=yes

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh