h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I heard someone say earlier that Mac OSX has an in built firewall. Does it? I'm running panther, and if its on panther, where can i find the settings and turn the firewall on. (sorry for such a question, I'm a bit new to macs).

It's in the "Sharing" settings of the System Preferences. Click on the "Firewall" tab, then click "start". Take a quick look down the "Allow" list to see if you need to use any of those items, and keep in mind that if you use something like Bittorrent you might have to add your own.

ok. thanks
I had to contact the supplier cos I got given Norton antivirus with my mac I won't go into how and why-its a bit of a long story) so I'm thinking I may not need the firewall if i've got autprotect on. It might clash anyway. We'll see. The idea about the multiple user accounts seems a great and devious idea! Are the standard accounts drastically different from the admin ones? I know you can specify access, but what sort of things can you block access to (thinking like a hacker or virus creator) whilst still making it easy to use your computer on a day to day basis? Any tips?

Cheers

Kaz.

Hey folks. Could someone tell me why iTunes has suddenly started launching itself without be asked to. Also my fan seems to be alot noisier than it used to be and I still really don't know anything about my iMac.
[Did that make sense?]

I can't help with iTunes, but when I had it on my PC it kept launching and demanding an internet connection at the most awkward moments, i.e. when I was trying to watch a movie full-screen. I figured out that it waited till you hadn't touched the keyboard or mouse for a while... It was a b*gger to uninstall.

On the subject of the fan, what are you laying your iBook on top of? A friend had a laptop that got really noisy - when I went to have a look I found that she'd just moved it to her upstairs office which had a leather-topped desk. The 1mm rubber feet were designed to give the minimum clearance required for cooling, but they were sinking half a milimetre into the leather and thus the vents were being obstructed. I got her to put a glass chopping board under it, and the fan went back to almost silent.

Check your iTunes preferences- you might have accidentally set it to open and check for updates to podcasts at certain times of days, or upon startup.

It's launching itself totally randomly, or are you doing something else like inserting a CD or DVD into the drive? There's a setting in System Preferences that can launch iTunes when you insert different kinds of disks, maybe the settings got messed up. Or if you have something like Last.fm or Mobster installed, if those are running they will sometimes start up iTunes.

The fan noise is a common problem, though I've never run into it. I think you have to reset the PRAM (restart the mac, and hold down apple-option-p-r keys before the startup chime, you should hear a second startup chime then let go of the keys). If that doesn't work, check the Apple Support pages or discussions to see what those say to do - that'll be a lot more accurate then my memory.

What model iMac do you have? Does this help?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301733

I'm on a G5 [avec light sensor] and iTunes was launching as best I could tell completely at random. I'm not subscibed to any podcasts with iTunes [why is the podcast directory in French btw?] so I'm at a loss as to why it might have been looking for them, I've checked the preference and set it to manual, I'll if that amkes a difference. Perhaps the preference or iTunes behaviour were altered in recent software update as this is a fairly recent phenomena.

Hi Az

I know this might be a dumb question but do you have an iPod connected to the iMac?

Also if you go to System Preferences from the Apple menu you can select Users and check whether iTunes is set to launch at start-up.

turvy (baffled)

No iPod.
And no it isn't set for start-up.

Thanks to everyone for their opinions so far.