Firewall and FreeBSD ports

[RW]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:51:16 -0700
Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 12:45:04PM -0400, John Almberg wrote:
> > I just set up a new server with a very restricted PF configuration.
> > One problem: I can no longer install software with ports (i.e,
> > the / usr/ports collection.) I have to disable PF to do so.
> > Obviously not a great solution.
> >
> > Am I correct in guessing that ports uses FTP to grab source files
> > from mirrors? I'm trying to figure out the smallest number of ports
> > (the TCP/IP kind) that I need to open in my firewall. I don't want
> > to enable incoming FTP requests, but do want to allow outgoing ftp
> > requests, I believe.
> >
> > Am I on the right track, here?
> 
> See the fetch(1) man page.  Try this first:
> 
> sh/bash: export FTP_PASSIVE_MODE=true
>     csh: setenv FTP_PASSIVE_MODE true
> 


passive ftp has been the default for long time, fetch is called
with the -p option.

If you have access to an http-proxy that supports ftp requests over
http, fetch can use that. Alternately you can probably avoid ftp
altogether by setting:
 

MASTER_SORT_REGEX?=   ^http:

in make.conf