[H-GEN] What's a good firewall for WIndows user?

[Byron Ellacott]

David Seikel wrote:
> My brother has recently got himself a broadband connection, and he asked me for advice on firewall software.  Last time I checked he had two Windows boxes in his house.  He is a photo copier / fax / printer technician for Xerox, and he has some basic Unix training to help him with his work.

Step 1: buy a cheap hardware router that does NAT
Step 2: reinstall the Windows machine, from behind said router
Step 3: replace Internet Explorer with Firefox
Step 4: remove Outlook Express

Step 1 is the most important.  Do not let the Windows machine be 
generally addressable from the Internet, because that is Not Safe.  No 
firewall software can fix bugs with the TCP/IP stack of the machine it's 
running on.  There may be some philosophical problems with NAT, but it's 
a hell of a lot better than exposing unsafe devices.

If you do the above, you don't need a "personal firewall."  Of course, 
having one that asks the user for confirmation before making an outbound 
connection doesn't hurt any.

I use a Netgear WGR614, which bridges a wireless and a wired LAN 
together, then NATs them onto the WAN.  It also does my Bigpond cable 
logon management for me, but I also had it configured to have a Linux 
headless box doing the logon management at one point.  The WGR614 
doesn't handle high connection loads well, I've found, but otherwise is 
adequate.

-- 
bje