User manual

Appendix C

Firewalls

Firewalls are network devices or software designed to protect your equipment

from malicious parties outside of your private network. They can function

in a number of ways, however the most common mechanism is to only allow

incoming traﬃc that is a response to an outgoing message. For tasks such as

web browsing and email this is not a problem, as these types of actions are

initiated by you going out and asking for information to be delivered to your

computer. Unfortunately, FTP-based image transmitters work in the oppo-

site fashion - the camera is the one establishing the connection and pushing

the images to your computer. As such, unless instructed otherwise, many

ﬁrewalls will block these attempts to connect and the transmitter will give

you a generic cannot connect to server error message. This section discusses

these systems and provides you with instructions on how to conﬁgure them

to coop erate with your camera.

C.1 Software Firewalls

Due to the security threats now present on the internet, software ﬁrewalls in-

stalled on computers have become commonplace to help bolster their protec-

tion. With the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2, such a ﬁrewall is now

being installed and activated on most new computers so this issue will come

up more and more often. Software ﬁrewalls are generally designed to protect

single machines from others on the same network whereas hardware ﬁrewalls

are designed to secure entire networks. When using your computer on public