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Warm deal ... firewall

R

RickyBaby

Member
Bought a 2Wire HomePortal firewall at Office Depot this weekend. Acts as a firewall and you share cable/dsl modems among mutliple computers behind the firewall. Has connections for ethernet, usb, and HPNA 2.0. All in all a pretty cool little box to replace my linux firewall.

Oh yea, the deal. This HomePortal 100 device was $300 awhile back but they recently dropped the price to $200. Office Depot has a mail in rebate for $100. So $200-$100MIR=$100. Not bad for a firewall with all the basic connection types.

RB
 


<< what the difference between that and the ROUTER. >>



I believe that a switch/router is an upgrade from a hun in that the switch/router sends traffic to the specific port that requested it, whereas a hub broadcasts all traffic to each and every other node on that hub. Neither of these, unless specifically stated, include firewall technologies. You can have a switch, router or hub without a firewall. However, many of the home routers (Linksys, SMC, 3COM) also include built-in firewalls.
 


<< You can have a switch, router or hub without a firewall. However, many of the home routers (Linksys, SMC, 3COM) also include built-in firewalls. >>



The cheap broadband routers like the Linksys, SMC, 3COM, Netgear use NAT, which is adequate for most users as a "firewall," although they do not perform as a firewall. They do block/restrict inbound traffic, but let all outbound traffic through. A true firewall monitors both inbound and outbound traffic. I think the 2wire product falls into that category.

The HPNA connector is a nice feature, also.

Bump for a great deal. I'd get one myself, but I'm moving next week to an area with no broadband access available. My SMC router will have to do.
 
Thanks for the clarification. My SMC does permit me to block outgoing traffic on particular ports, which is neat. I would admit, that I'm not sure exactly how I would use that particular feature. I guess if all that you use is http, ftp & mail, you could block outgoing traffic to ports other than these three. I wonder how that would hinder passive ftp? At this point, I am over my head. As you can see, I know just about enough to be dangerous. Thanks for the clarification.

btw ... this deal is a repost.
 
Blocking all unnecessary outbound traffic is generally a good idea. For normal "surfing" behavior -- including the use of passive FTP -- blocking unnecessary outbound traffic won't impact you. Active FTP, however, will break.

Even if you aren't into restricting outbound traffic, it's a good idea to block the outbound Windows networking ports (endpoint mapper [TCP/135, UDP/135], NetBIOS name service [TCP/137, UDP/137], NetBIOS datagram service [UDP/138], NetBIOS session service [TCP/139], and Windows 2000 session service [TCP/445]). This will prevent accidental or malicious "leakage" of windows networking information onto the Internet.

 
A hub is simply a multiport repeater. It takes a signal and retransmits it cleanly.
A switch is a multiport bridge. It can filter traffic and separate broadcast domains based upon the MAC address only. It does not make decisions based upon the IP traffic.
 
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