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Firewalls

The big question out there today is do I need a firewall and if so which one should I get? And what is a firewall ???

We will try to give you some information about all types of firewalls that will be good for personal and small businesses alike.

What is a firewall?

The term "fire wall" originally meant, and still means, a fireproof wall intended to prevent the spread of fire from one room or area of a building to another. The Internet is a volatile and unsafe environment when viewed from a computer-security perspective; therefore "firewall" is an excellent metaphor for network security.

"Usually, a firewall's purpose is to keep the jerks out of your network while still letting you get your job done."  But what is does is to stop unwanted connections from the outside world.  Every program that you use uses a port (number from 1- 65353) by knowing what port number a program uses you can block and in turn knowing what IP address belong to your network you can only allow only your network to connect.

Types of firewalls:

Software firewalls: 

Seems to be the choice for home uses these days mostly because some of them are free and easily installed.  They also do a fairly good job for the average computer user, the main problems with software firewalls is that the default settings are not always that good and do some times block some certain things that need to be able to come through so what ends up happening is that people turn them off and forget that they did that and they are no longer protected from unwanted connections.

Hardware firewalls:  

There are different levels of hardware firewalls and we have put them into two levels.

LEVEL 1: Personal/small business orientated firewalls these are the pre-made cheaper firewalls like linksys, d-link and 3com just to name a couple, these firewalls are better then the software firewalls and gives you some more flexibility in setup and installation they allow you to connect multiple computers to them and they protect against the standard attacks and even some advanced attacks.

LEVEL 2: Within this level there are two differences. One being the Top end pre-made firewalls like the PIX, Nortel etc etc pretty much all of the large names in the internet has made a High end firewall these box’s are very flexible and have multiple uses, the down side is that they normally have there own type of OS which means you need to learn that OS or get a support contract also the expandability is some times capped at what firewall you buy and they can be very very expensive.  The second type of hardware firewall is one that you or your network personal can build them selves most are built with a Unix flavor of OS redhat/suse/bsd etc etc these are very flexible and cost affective as the OS costs nothing and most companies have some one that has the experience with the OS the only cost is the machine to put it on but with the money you would save from the others you could afford to by for or five machines.  The down side is the firewall is as only good as the person or people that put it together and they will need to keep on top of any new patches or holes that are found.