Firewall

Following a recommendation from the IT Service Advisory Board, the university administration has approved a firewall concept developed by the IT Service for the University of Bamberg’s data network.

This is intended to protect PCs and servers from unauthorized access, both from outside and from within the network. Therefore, the concept is based on the principle that data paths that are not needed—if technically possible—are blocked.

From the Internet to the university network (from the outside in)

The computers on the university’s local network are protected by the firewall against access from the Internet—that is, from outside the university. This means that access to computers within the university from outside the university is no longer permitted.

If specific work-related requirements make external access absolutely necessary, a computer falls into the “server” category. For more information on this, see the section Server Operator.

From the University Network to the Internet (from the inside out)

Effective May 3, 2004, outbound communication from workstation PCs was restricted to WWW, FTP, and news (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP/FTPS, and NNTP protocols) as well as various chat ports (IRC, AOL, ICQ, Jabber, and Tencent QQ).
Since many students manage their email accounts with private providers via the university’s network, outbound traffic for POP3, IMAP, and SSH was reinstated on May 10, 2004.

For more information on this topic, see the section on work computers.