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.
A particularly powerful and flexible firewall is a Linux box with multiple Ethernet interfaces. If you'd rather not dedicate a full-blown PC to the job, Soekris Engineering (www.soekris.com) makes a line of single-board PC-compatible machines specifically designed as network engines. They come without any software, so you have to roll your own, but there are many people who can help you.
I have a Soekris net4801 acting as my primary router. It provides QoS (Quality of Service) in the upstream direction to my DSL line, along with DHCP, IPv6 routing/tunneling and IPv4 NAT for any local machines that need it.
Except for the filtering inherent in a NAT, it doesn't actually filter any packets because I basically don't believe in firewalls; I'd much rather just keep my individual machines as secure as possible. Basically, that means banning anything and everything from Microsoft; we're in the process of getting rid of the very last Windows machine on our network (my wife's desktop) and replacing it with an iMac. The combination of Mac OS X on the desktop and Linux on servers can do pretty much everything Windows can do, and do it a whole lot better and with far better security.
Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
