Firewalls and Routers

[Forumadmin]

With the ever increasing supply of worms and other such nasties it's imperitive to have at least a basic firewall. The increasing popularity of DSL and having your PC conected 24/7 exposes your system even more.

So

What's the go these days with security firewalls and routers. Who's using what and why?

Anyone care to share their setups?

[Forumadmin]

Here's a great site for a little more depth into networking security issues etc. How to set up your network to best suite your needs etc.

Find it here (http://www.firewall.cx)

[srm]

Hi Ross & All,

I was 1 of my old PCs (a Pentium 166) with 2 network cards
1 connecting to Optus cable,
1 connecting to an 8 port Switch (which connects all the other PCs).

This is running RH 9 and some basic iptables rules.

I also use zone alarm on the PCs behind the firewall - just in case.

Regards,

Stephen.

[Forumadmin]

Hi Ross & All,

I was 1 of my old PCs (a Pentium 166) with 2 network cards
1 connecting to Optus cable,
1 connecting to an 8 port Switch (which connects all the other PCs).

This is running RH 9 and some basic iptables rules.

I also use zone alarm on the PCs behind the firewall - just in case.

Regards,

Stephen.
Cool Stephen,
So do you run smoothwall at all or just some tables in redhat? I guess there is a heap of ways to do it. I muck around sometimes with smoothwall on a standalone PC and find it quite good.

My current setup is a bit different. I run a router hardware firewall which connects to 2 internal networks. On one network I have a dmz and the smoothwall on a linux network which is quite fun to hack with and use it as a honey pot amongst other things.
On the second network I have ISA server sitting between to subnets giving a very robust software firewall to boot.
I also run the web server, mail server, file server and the forum. It all seems to fit somehow. :D
I have been playing with my mail server spam filter tonight using ORFEE (http://www.vamsoft.com). Very nice indeed. I'm using the new beta version 1.5 R8 without a spam or virus mail in sight. I just hope it continues.
Anyone else want to let us know what they are using?

[Colin Smith]

My current system is a Dynalink PCI ADSL card, Firewall is Symantec personal firewall. Have been running this for 2 years now and I am up to now quite happy with it. I have been looking to change my current system. The reason for this is the PC that is used for the ADSL connection also runs Symantec firewall, Symantec Anti-Virus, Apache web server, PHP, mySQL and various print servers and it is starting to struggle. There are 4 other PC's that route through this to access the Internet.

I have recently specified a PLANET ADSL Wireless Firewall Router, ADW-4300 (http://www.planet.com.tw/news/productnews/ADW-4300.htm) (link) for a client. (Trade price NZ$335.00 -gst) I have been eyeing this product for myself for a little while because it offers about every feature most people would want.
 ADSL connection
 Firewall
 Dynamic DNS
 DMZ for web server
 VPN
 Internal DHCP
 Wireless access
 4 port switch - 10/100
 URL filtering
 Internal Internet blocking.

I will set it up on my own system to test it before installing it on my clients' premises. If you are interested I will let you know how it went!

Colin Smith

[Forumadmin]

Howdi Colin,

Some feed back on the Planet 4300 would be great. How easy to setup, any problems etc. I'll Look forward to any feedback.

I've been using the Draytek 2600 (http://www.draytek.com.au/products/Vigor2600.htm) ADSL routers for my last few installs and must say I find them to be very good. Cheap to buy and very easy to install. They have a VOIP model as well which has been quite fun to play with. VOIP is really making some inroads these days.

Any way
Cheers.

[coppo1]

This seems to happen alot with me and another guy i know,

Where you get bumped from your server ( gaming) and then cannot reconnect.

The only way to get up and running again is to restart PC and re-power adsl
modem...

My Unit is a D-Link DSL-G604T, there is a firmware update on their site,
stating something about fixing probs with MTU's .

does this sounds like it, i hate patching only to find out, the problem is still
there.

[Dean Roddey]

For PC-savvy folks, probably just having a firewall in the DSL/Cable router might be good enough. It prevents any incoming connection, and a savvy person isn't going to be opening questionable attachments and whatnot to get a trojan horse behind the firewall.

The XP SP2 firewall seems to do a fairly good job of making sure you are aware of anything that tries to open a listening port on the local machine, which will show up a trojan horse that does get in and tries to listen for incoming. But it won't do anything about one that gets in and actively connects back out to some server somewhere.

That's the degree that I take it and it's worked fine for me, but I'm very careful about what I open and I virus scan everything before I open it and keep a close watch on what is running.