Hardware Firewall

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I've Decided to go down the hardware route after my subscription is up for my firewall software. As my linksys router's firewall is very basic I want to buy a dedicated/better configurable firewall and came across a belkin one which looks good Link for the price. Has anyone got any advice on this, are belkin firewall's good? One problem I'll have is that my modem has a wireless point on it which my laptop uses so it will be exposed as it will be in front of the firewall so I'll have to buy a wireless AP to go behind the firewall.

 

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whats your interpretation of a hardware firewall?
at the end of the day all firewalls are just software logic, wheather on ASIC chips or installed on top of a linux system (one of the most used firewalls around is just software on top of a linux OS)

Is the belkin one not likely to be as basic as the linksys? or is it actually a dedicated firewall device rather than an add on to a router?

 

Sorry Phoenix, what I meant is that I wanted an appliance firewall. I done a search on firewall's and the netgear one is from what I gather a firewall first and a router/hub second. My linksys one is very very basic and can't really be configured very much. I've heard netgear are pretty good for the price.

 

Looks ok, is it a fairly new product out? Can't find any reviews about it really.

 

Does anyone have a netgear firewall and if so what are your thoughts on it?

 

If you have an old PC kicking around, and some space you could go for smoothwall

 

I did think about using a linux firewall as I have Ubuntu on an old PC but didn't want to keep the PC on all the time.

 

Yeah, fair point....

 

I'm just as confused as hell with all these different Netgear devices. I think netgear must bring out a new model every 30 seconds...

 

Have you looked at Zyxel?

Good value, stable and really good configuration...

 

Cheers for that Boyce, i'm always open to suggestions. You don't have any links to places that sell them? I've been on their website and it doesn't have European reseller on there.

 

Hi Slypie,
Have a look Here for a Zyxel appliances.

HTH
NB

 

course, you only need the firewall running as long as you need access to the internet. since it sits between your network and the outside world, shutting it down when you turn off your pc's further disconnects your pc from malicious outside sources

 

Yeah, as Fergal said, you only need the PC on as long as your network needs to be connected....

 

Yeah, it was expensive, but I like my Cisco Pix firewall.

Well......expensive for the company.....they bought it for me.

 

Since this firewall appears to be for your home network smoothwall on an old PC will work very well. It will run on a 486 with 32 or 64 megs of ram, at least I believe so, with suffiecient performance for a home internet connection. You could find an old AMD or Pentium and it would work very well. It would only require a couple of nics and a small hard drive as it only needs a few megs of install space, and you don't need a monitor or mouse for it if your hardware will boot without them.

You could build/buy something like that for less than you could get one of the more expensive Netgear, Linksys, Zyxel routers designed for SOHO usage, and have a commercial/enterprise class firewall. That seems like a lot of bang for the buck to me....