Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Is a Linksys router considered a firewall?

Pragma · 08-05-2003, 02:35 PM

Technically, it's not a firewall. It does Network Address Translation to route connections from the external IP address to various internal connections. As such, only connections you configure can be initiated on the outside (ie: you tell it that you're running a webserver on machine X, so forward traffic for X on port 80 to it).

True firewalls do so much more than simply "block all packets unless specified otherwise", they do stateful packet inspection, etc. NAT is a poor-man's firewall, I suppose.

Running ZoneAlarm or any other software firewall is an excellent idea, even with the NAT solution.

08-05-2003, 02:35 PM	#9 (permalink)
Pragma I am Winter Born Location: Alexandria, VA	Technically, it's not a firewall. It does Network Address Translation to route connections from the external IP address to various internal connections. As such, only connections you configure can be initiated on the outside (ie: you tell it that you're running a webserver on machine X, so forward traffic for X on port 80 to it). True firewalls do so much more than simply "block all packets unless specified otherwise", they do stateful packet inspection, etc. NAT is a poor-man's firewall, I suppose. Running ZoneAlarm or any other software firewall is an excellent idea, even with the NAT solution. __________________ Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!