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Shan
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Joined: 04 Nov 2003
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 1:34 am    Post subject: Firewalling Router Reply with quote

Over the past couple of months I've been getting increasingly paranoid over hackers getting into my systems. I've got snort running and what I hope is a good iptables based firewall but it has a lot of services running that need to be always accessable to the internal network, such as samba/nfs, apache et al; in addition to working as a router. As it stands, this machine (Nexus) provides no services to the world at large; but I fear that since it is "touchable" to the outside, its a risk. What I'm thinking of doing is offloading the firewall / dhcp / router duties to a true router; and having Nexus be "just another machine". In the end I'd probably merge Nexus into a hardened machine as well just because I'm that paranoid but first I need to find a good, reliable (but preferably cheap) unit to handle this duty. Ideally it would have a web interface for me to manage it but I'm fine with command line as well. Having it come from a company that is reputable and offers updates would be a plus but isn't required. Above all though it needs to be reliable in both firewall AND routing. I've done some basic googling based on devices that are available at the nearby Staples found that people complained of units that would crap out over any significant load (some upstream, others downstream, some both). My home-network has half a dozen computers so it has to be able to handle some traffic.

Any reccomendations?

EDIT: It doesn't need to be an 8 port setup or anything, just a WAN+2 or 3 LAN ports; I have an existing switch I can use to connect the rest of the machines into the new unit.
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occ
Apprentice
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Joined: 06 May 2005
Posts: 202

PostPosted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 10:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
but I fear that since it is "touchable" to the outside, its a risk.


There is always some risk, but if you really provide no 'outside' services then you should be able to have a pretty tight ship here, and unless there is a security exploit in iptables itself, I don't see any obvious risk.
Furthermore, most of the time you can restrinct the 'binding' of the services you provide internally to the internal interface only.

I would feel safer with an iptables that I control rather than trustung a black box to do the job of firewalling my home network.

Another thing to consider is that firewalling/routing duty are fairly light. maybe you do have and old pc you can dedicate to that task.
I use an old 8 year old Pentium III for that job. and it does it very well without breaking a sweat.
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