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General discussion

Routers and firewalls

Sep 28, 2004 7:19AM PDT

Do all routers have firewalls or do routers act like a firewall. What is the best and the cheapest router to get that has a firewall. Need it for home networking and business.

Discussion is locked

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(NT) (NT) I use all D-link.
Sep 29, 2004 1:01AM PDT
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Re: Routers and firewalls
Sep 29, 2004 1:09AM PDT

You have to define what a firewall is first. Your basic NAT ROUTER is a firewall if you write that unsolicited packets don't make it to the machines behind the stock configured NAT ROUTER.

Others will only call it a firewall if it has "stateful inspection".

But for all the worms that we've seen, all the routers in their stock configuration would have kept the machine safe.

Bob

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Re: Routers and firewalls
Oct 1, 2004 1:54AM PDT

Most routers nowsaday have built-in firewall. Not all though. DLink routers are good and not expensive. Depend on wire or wireless router, the price could be varied.

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Re: Routers and firewalls
Oct 1, 2004 5:47AM PDT

If you need it for home use buy a netgear router its about $50 just make sure it has SPI on the box some of the older netgear routers don't have them and it doesn't really cost that much more to have it. The SPI and the Nat firewall features are on by default so you don't have to configure that part. they also have a wireless version for $70 -$90 depending on whether you get the 11mbs 802.11b or
54 mbs 802.11g, don't pay any attention to claims of 108mbs super G claims, sometimes they work and sometimes they cause unwanted problems with cordless phones.

If it's for business use I would highly recommend you pay more and get a business class router with firewall.
Netgear's runs for about $180 - 200 with built in wireless router. There is a difference between this one and a $50 router. The home routers come with a stripped down version of the SPI firewall. fine for home but business use should use a real firewall. Hope this helps.