First Post- questions about firewalls+disk utilites

[Lancelot911]

Hey everyone, this is my first post here although i do come here often to obtain mac info.

I'm actually a newb to macs. I switched from windows about 5 months ago, and I'm very happy with my switch. I just wish i had seen this site before i actually went and bought my powerbook, I could have saved a few hundred dollars. And btw, if you live in New York, do not go to the Apple store in SOHO: you'll come out feeling like someone robbed you. Definitely a bad shopping experience over there.

I do however have a few questions that remain unanswered and hopefully someone can help me out.

I use a powerbook g4 1.67 w/1 gig ram running OS X Tiger 10.4.2. Its connected to a Win XP rig via airport express router.

1- the topic of viruses and and virus scanners has been covered extensively on these forums; all i'll say is that i bought a .mac subscription and it comes with McAfee's virex.

2- I have the firewall enabled and use brickhouse as my gui interface. My problem is that i can't seem to find out how to stealth my ports. When using the shieldsup utility off of www.grc.com most of my ports show up.
Is there anyway using brickhouse to stealth my computer? Also is worth considering the use of Netbarrier as my firewall?

3- On same note, does my airport express router act as a hardware firewall?

4- What disk utilities would you use to clean up clutter on your mac?

5- My rig came with OS X 10.3.8, i updated to Tiger, but ical didn't install correctly, so if i click on it it jumps up once in the dock and then nothing. I took a look at a possible fix on the apple website (something about changing my midi settings in the midi utility) but that didn't help any. Any suggestions?

6- Also what are permissions? And how can i tell if i've ran them?

hope i didn't miss these topics while searching the forums, and sorry in advance if i did.
Thanks for the help, and thanks for this website... really informative

[g/re/p]

1- the topic of viruses and and virus scanners has been covered extensively on these forums; all i'll say is that i bought a .mac subscription and it comes with McAfee's virex.

To date, there are no actual viri, trojans, or worms that
effect Mac OS X Tiger.

2- I have the firewall enabled and use brickhouse as my gui interface. My problem is that i can't seem to find out how to stealth my ports. When using the shieldsup utility off of www.grc.com most of my ports show up.
Is there anyway using brickhouse to stealth my computer? Also is worth considering the use of Netbarrier as my firewall?

You don't really need brickhouse in Tiger - open the Sharing preference pane in System Preferences and click on the
firewall tab. Start the firewall and click on the advanced
tab to enable stealth mode.

*you have to turn brickhouse off to use the Tiger firewall.

3- On same note, does my airport express router act as a hardware firewall?

No, i am fairly certain it does not.

4- What disk utilities would you use to clean up clutter on your mac?

I am not aware of any such utilities for mac - someone else may have some suggestions.

5- My rig came with OS X 10.3.8, i updated to Tiger, but ical didn't install correctly, so if i click on it it jumps up once in the dock and then nothing. I took a look at a possible fix on the apple website (something about changing my midi settings in the midi utility) but that didn't help any. Any suggestions?

Deleting it and reinstalling it from the install disk may work.
You might have to extract the package from the install disk
to do so - you can use Pacifist to extract the package:
http:/www.charlessoft.com/

6- Also what are permissions? And how can i tell if i've ran them?

If you have to ask, then you probably have not run them.
Run repair permisions using Disk Utility in the Utilities folder.
You should repair permissions after installing new apps, including software updates.