What is a firewall?

I found this great website about firewalls, the site does a great job explaining firewalls. Check it out: firewall

My experience with a firewall:

I was installing my new high speed internet; everything was going well until I got to the 6th step. I couldn’t get connected. I called my service provider and they walked me through the steps, however to no avail. I cursed, kicked and vowed that something was wrong with my computer. So I called a friend. Within minutes she had my service up and running. Well to make a long story short my

McAfee

was on and all I had to do was turn it off to install the high speed service.

Firewalls can greatly enhance the security of a host or a network.

They can be used to do one or more of the following things:

*To protect and insulate the applications, services and machines of your internal network from unwanted traffic coming in from the public Internet.

*To limit or disable access from hosts of the internal network to services of the public Internet.

*To support network address translation (NAT), which allows your internal network to use private IP addresses and share a single connection to the public Internet (either with a single IP address or by a shared pool of automatically assigned public addresses). Retrieved from firewall handbook

A great resource to understanding firewalls:

Internet Firewalls:Frequently Asked Questions This site really helped me out.

Shopping for a firewall check out these sites:

Tips

Windows Market Place

Network Liquidators

-- JenniferHairfield - 14 Dec 2005 -- SueMcGinnis - 18 Dec 2005