A firewall for your computer is like the lock on a door of your house. You usually lock the front door of your house when you leave to prevent other people from snooping, stealing, or causing any other kind of damage.
The Internet is similar. Most Web sites are unobtrusive and benign. Only a small percentage holds any threat to our privacy. However, because there are such a huge number of Internet users, even a small percentage of them with an impulse to vandalize adds up to a very significant number of people. For this reason, you need to provide protection for your computer.
Novell Client Firewall (NCF) is engineered to detect a suspicious connection. When NCF alerts you to a suspicious connection request from an application on your computer or from the Internet, it gives you some information about the request (such as the DNS or IP address of the remote computer), the application making the request, and other data to help you decide if you want to allow the connection or not. If in doubt, simply disallow the connection this one time. See what happens. If you are prevented from doing something you wanted to do, then try doing it again and this time allow the connection when prompted. In this way, you can learn what your applications are doing and which ones you need to be careful of or even uninstall completely from your system. NCF will also alert you to the presence of a Trojan horse.
NOTE: A good rule of thumb when using NCF is to keep the settings NCF suggests if you do not have a particular reason or the knowledge to change them. If you have any doubt or confusion about changing any default setting, we recommend that you save or record the setting before changing it.
In NCF, an access setting is basically a rule that you set regulating how much of your information you want to let other computers access or how much information you want to allow other computers to send to yours.
NCF uses various security settings to keep your computer protected from unwanted access from other computers on the Internet or any type of network connection. It also restricts the flow of information coming into your computer as you see fit. You might set a rule about file sharing, for example, so that your computer shares your files only with other computers you trust on your local network. A common use for a firewall is to restrict the amount of information your computer gives out while it is connected to the Internet.
HINT: If you are unfamiliar with how firewalls work, we recommend that you keep the firewall in Rules Wizard mode for several days of use.