Firewall/router

[Glenn Crocker]

Firewalls like the Sonicwall products enable NetMeeting and other complex
protocols, but retain the benefits of an "appliance" style solution.
They're even pretty cheap on eBay these days.

Running things (ftp, admin tools, whatever) on your firewall is a great way
to make it vulnerable.  This is an okay approach for a home network with no
valuable data, but I would not do this kind of thing in a corporate
environment.

-glenn

Glenn Crocker
Netmud   http://www.netmud.com
913-451-7785, glenn at netmud.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Hutchins [mailto:hutchins at opus1.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 4:36 PM
> To: KCLUG List
> Subject: Re: Firewall/router
>
>
> One reason it's better to have an actual PC rather than a dedicated box is
> that they're far more flexible in what you can let through.  For some
> protocols like NetMeeting the only way to allow connections is to
> "DMZ" the
> box that wants to connect, which essentially leaves that box completely
> exposed.  Linux has modules to handle most of the popular chat/video/game
> protocols without blanket exposure like that.
>
> I like to use the Firewall for FTP sessions too, seems more
> efficient to go
> direct from remote to firewall to storage rather than
> remote-firewall-workstation-storage.
>
> And there are handy network tools that you can run from the firewall box,
> and so on.
>
>
>