Hardware firewall??

[Bohrn]

Hi. I know alot of you here are REALLY good at networking and the like, so I'll ask. I am currently using ZoneAlarm to keep the kiddies out of my home computer now that I have @home. But as it dissects packets that come and go, it gives me higher latency and other bad stuff when gaming. Now the @home tech guy(this one seemed to know his stuff more than the normal ones) said that a hardware firewall would be alot better, with no loss of speed and harder to crack. But I am worried about not being able to use the internet from behind it as I do now. I hear tell of having to do special things to play games and use chat or whatever. This I do not want. Also, cost is an issue. The tech guy told me that single port units were pretty cheap. Any recommendations?

Thanx

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AsusP3B-F,P3 880 Slot1, 256mgsPC133,G40032megSH, Diamond MX300,13.5gigs of HD's,52X CDrom,WinME, PD 5.41 w/ 6.10ICD,Altec Lansing ATP3Subwoofer,
Envision 17",Terrayon Cable modem w/D-Link nic,1 grey cat,1 black cat & 1 calico

[HomeBrewer]

This is a great solution for me. I also am on @home.

for multiple pcs:

http://www.linksys.com/products/prod...prid=20&grid=5

or for a single:

http://www.linksys.com/products/prod...rid=142&grid=5

You stay completely invisible to the outside, however ZoneAlarm does provide protection from TROJANS establishing outbound connections without your permission.

HomeBrewer the Quintessential Alchemist!

[DuRaNgO]

Linksys is a very good solution as well as the SMC Barricade with four ports built in for around $100+/-

[Bohrn]

Will these things do what I want? Not interfere with my playing online games? And not be too fussy with setup? Thanx

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AsusP3B-F,P3 880 Slot1, 256mgsPC133,G40032megSH, Diamond MX300,13.5gigs of HD's,52X CDrom,WinME, PD 5.41 w/ 6.10ICD,Altec Lansing ATP3Subwoofer,
Envision 17",Terrayon Cable modem w/D-Link nic,1 grey cat,1 black cat & 1 calico

[Liquid Snake]

They all use NAT, I think. I think that is what people are referring to when they say it might interfere with gaming. Generally, NAT will interfere with anything needing inbound connections e.g. servers. I have not had any problems with the games I have. If so, you can just configure the firewall to open the ports needed.

The two units mentioned in this thread are routers for sharing internet access. They have basic firewalls. A good dedicated firewall is the <A HREF="http://www.sonicwall.com/products/soho/index.html">SonicWALL SOHO</A>. Not cheap compared to the routers, but is a stronger firewall than the ones you find in the routers.

[Bohrn]

Liquid Snake, what do u use?

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AsusP3B-F,P3 880 Slot1, 256mgsPC133,G40032megSH, Diamond MX300,13.5gigs of HD's,52X CDrom,WinME, PD 5.41 w/ 6.10ICD,Altec Lansing ATP3Subwoofer,
Envision 17",Terrayon Cable modem w/D-Link nic,1 grey cat,1 black cat & 1 calico

[Liquid Snake]

Netopia R7100-C SDSL router. Has one of these "basic firewalls" that I mentioned. All it really does is block ports. Works fine, as when I put up ZoneAlarm on my machine, days go by without any alerts coming up in ZoneAlarm. But, if you are overly paranoid about security, you could get the SonicWall.

[2Whyzzi]

Better yet, Find some time (and alot of it if you are new to *nix), dig that old 486 out the closet, find a 500Meg hard drive, slap a pair of NICs in it and install OpenBSD.

If you do it right, you won't have to assign it an IP address!

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Abit BH6 r1.01
Celeron2-566 o/c to 850MHz+Slotket!!! 1.8v
256 Megs PC-133 Cas3
Matrox G400 SH OEM (not oc'd) rev=03h
Diamond Monster Sound MX400

[Wombat]

I can't agree with that one. I'm a big *nix advocate, but this isn't quite the right tool for the job. If ping is a concern, popping your signal through two extra NIC's, plus a computer bus... It's great for a lot of things, and can be really easy to set up, but will add a little to your ping, I think.

[Electric Amish]

IMO, BlackIceDefender kicks the HELL out of ZA. I run it while gaming and it doesn't seem to interfere at all.

I know that Greebe runs it as well.

amish

[Greebe]

About the SonicWall...

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Vulnerable systems: SonicWALL SOHO2 firmware version 5.0.0, ROM version 4.0.0 Sending a very long string (several hundreds of characters) as the Username in the authentication page of the SonicWALL web server will cause the Firewall to react strangely: it begins to refuse connections to the 80/tcp port and it stops routing packets from the internal LAN. After about 30 seconds, it will return to its normal behavior.

Vendor status: The vendor has been contacted and is planning to release a patch.</font>

Hope this was fixed

[Liquid Snake]

Well, I never used a SonicWall myself, so I didn't know about that

[Bohrn]

I didn't really like the Sonic wall thing. It looked a bit intimidating, so I'll prolly go another way. The linksys thing, or BI efender. Software way isn't what I was after tho, so maybe the Linksys single porter. Further thoughts??

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AsusP3B-F,P3 880 Slot1, 256mgsPC133,G40032megSH, Diamond MX300,13.5gigs of HD's,52X CDrom,WinME, PD 5.41 w/ 6.10ICD,Altec Lansing ATP3Subwoofer,
Envision 17",Terrayon Cable modem w/D-Link nic,1 grey cat,1 black cat & 1 calico

[2Whyzzi]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Wombat:
I can't agree with that one. I'm a big *nix advocate, but this isn't quite the right tool for the job. If ping is a concern, popping your signal through two extra NIC's, plus a computer bus... It's great for a lot of things, and can be really easy to set up, but will add a little to your ping, I think.</font>

Keep in mind: your ISP is problably limiting the throughput of your your broadband connection anyway - and you can only really go as fast as your connection allows. On the flip side, what really is the speed of the processor/DSPs in your 'linksys/dlink/smc' hardware router?

OK.. maybe on a 486 isa bus... being the average speed of 8MHz. But lets be realistic, any filtering device - be it your hardware or software - will 'slow' that connection down because it has pass the tcp/udp/icmp through your ruleset/policy before deciding on whether it can pass the packet on or if it has to trash it.

Now, in the terms of a gamer after maximum performance: would you rather have that filtering done on your pc via black ice, Zone alarm, etc - OR have a seperate device that does it for you? The gamer after maximum performance buys the hardware router. Why? Running filtering software on the pc inevitably uses some cpu cycles to examine the tcp/ip stack, thus affecting your game performance (realistically though, modern computers being so fast your almost guaranteed it won't slow the computer down that much, you problably won't even notice it). But the gamer after maximum performance won't take that risk of the lossing those cpu cycles because he/she could be fragged.

But I have an alterior motive to using OpenBSD as my firewall/NAT. In my off hours I'm trying to learn Apache, PHP, and (my)SQL. Since I've dedicated some old hardware (3rd pc) to that task, I might as well use it as my firewall to share my broadband connection with my wife on the second computer.

Lord knows I've put enough money into PC upgrades, and he also knows that I can't stop upgrading them either.