Date   : Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:00:47 +0100
From   : philb@... (Phil Blundell)
Subject: Econet <> Ethernet

On Sat, 2009-08-01 at 17:02 +0200, Rick Murray wrote:
> Just to clarify - when I talked about ports, I was referring to *ECONET* 
> ports, not TCP/IP ones.
> 
> In this sense, it would seem more logical to be able to block certain 
> 'ports' from passing through the gateway.

Possibly, though I can't offhand think of many that it would make sense
to block.  The print server ports are about the only ones that leap to
mind.

If you blocked the fileserver ports then that'd defeat the object of the
exercise for a lot of people, and in any case most file servers manage
their own security fairly well.  Other machines don't generally listen
for anything other than immediate operations (and usually just machine
peek at that) so again there wouldn't be much benefit in adding an extra
level of firewalling.

Can you give a concrete example of a situation where port-based blocking
would be useful?  I'm happy enough to implement that in the gateway
(code-size constraints aside) but I don't really want to rush off and
add a feature that isn't going to be of much real-world value.

p.