Dean or anyone,
Would the firewall feature in these routers (wireless or wired) be good enough so that I can get rid of Zonealarm Pro which contributes 10 to 15% more of CPU usage when playing Slimserver? If I could get rid of the sw based firewall, that would be great.
the short answer is that there is good reason to use both the features of your router firewall at the network edge, _and_ software protection on the machines inside your LAN. the reason is that each can protect from different threats.
the edge firewall will close off ports, can drop packets for some well known attacks (SYN, et.al.) and just generally keep net-scanners at bay.
the s/w firewall can do some or all of the above, but also protect you from downloaded components that may be trying to send data. zone alarm pro is particularly good at this. it can also help keep a virus from spreading inside your LAN.
as far as the CPU issue with ZAP, have you tried making configuration changes that might keep it from inspecting the SS/SB packets so aggressively? i don't have any specific recommendations off the top of my head, but i do know that ZAP has some very granular settings for trust that can be based on program, IP, port, protocol, etc. i'd guess you could get it to stand down somewhat w/r/t this traffic.
--rt _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
