by I setup a box here on my home network with Redhat 7.1 and the default
firewall. I configured it to the highest level of security and no
exceptions. I turned off services that were unneeded. However, I use it to
front my network and share my cable modem connection with a wired and a
wireless network. That's the background.
Now I'm considering upgrading my wireless network to 802.11b. Right now I
have a Proxim Symphony wireless network. I was looking in the paper today
and saw various ads for wireless access routers that route your cable
connection to a wired AND a wireless network.
So now I'm wondering about these. Are they secure or do you still need to
provide your own firewall? Do they contain firewall software and is it any
good? Does anybody have any experience with them that they can share? I'd
love to hear.
Basically I'm trying to decide whether I should make my Linux "server" just
another computer on the network behind one of these gateways or whether it's
more secure to have the Linux server fronting the network. Right now I'm
reading up on iptables so hopefully I'll shortly have a good handle on that
technology and be able to put it to use, but until then I'm relying on
Redhat 7.1s default ipchains implementation.
Preston