Controlling Network Traffic
Charles S. Edge, Chris Barker, Ehren Schwiebert · Apress eBooks · 2010
Any computer—and more to the point, a Mac OS X Server—receives a barrage of traffic over the network interfaces. You can use two services in particular to control this traffic. The first is the router, and the second is the firewall. A router is a device on your network that chooses the paths between devices that network traffic takes; in short, a router connects networks and then manages the logic of how data is sent between them. A firewall , on the other hand, controls the various types of data that are allowed to communicate over those paths. In many cases, a firewall and a router are one device, although they can be two separate devices. This chapter first covers setting up the server as a router and then covers leveraging the firewall to restrict access to the server. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.