Firewalls And Home
Networks
What
You Need to Know About Firewalls And Home Networks Security
One of the main advantages of having a router or firewall
set up on your network for anyone who is dealing with firewalls
and home networks is that you automatically get a pretty decent
level of security against people who may try to hack in from
the internet. That because the router acts as the intermediary
for all communications between not only the computers on your
network but it also handles all the communications between
the computers on your network and the rest of the Internet
and that’s what I like to focus on here.
I want to talk to you about firewalls and home networks,
more specifically how firewalls and routers protect your computers
from outside attacks.
First let’s take a look at a routerless scenario; lets say
you subscribe to a cable broadband service but what I am about
to cover also holds true for DSL and satellite broadband.
So the cable company has sent you a modem which you connected
to a cable coming out of your wall or to a phone line in the
case of DSL and this connects the modem to the Internet and
then you connect your computer to the modem with Ethernet
cable.
When you power the modem
on your computer, the computer is assigned an IP address,
this is it's own unique address on the Internet and no other
computer in the world has this address, this IP address you
are assigned is also known as a WAN or Wide Area Network address.
Because the Internet is essentially a big wide network.
So why should you be
interested in firewalls and home networks?
Well
unfortunately there are certain bad people out there who are
constantly scanning the Internet for random IP addresses and
testing them for accessibility. If your IP address randomly
comes up, and you don't have a firewall running on your computer,
there is a possibility that someone could find their way into
your system and cause all sorts of problems. So as you can
see, the subject of firewalls and home networks should be
of great interest to you now than find out later on that "it
can happen to you".
I
have found some great
firewalls and routers that offers lots of features for the
home network user dealing with routers, firewalls and
home networks, and it doesn't tale a degree to get it working.
Now
we will talk in greater detail about setting up computer-based
firewalls else where. So the main issue here is that in this
particular set up that we are looking at, your computer is
essentially directly connected the Internet.
Another issue with
this set up is that you can only connect one computer at a
time to the Internet. So a router can solve both of these
problems and more for you. When you throw a router into the
setup you connect it directly to your modem in place of the
computer. So now your router acts and a firewall for you and
protects you from out side attacks
So when we are
talking firewalls and home networks, we are saying that your
router acts as the firewall and therefore the WAN IP address
is assigned to the router instead of your computer. Your computers
are connected to the router or firewall and the router or
firewall in most cases then assigns each computer it's own
local IP address, this is also known as a LAN or local area
network address.
The
firewall receives the WAN IP address for your
internet connection then it assigns every computer
on the LAN it's own local IP address.
So all the computer connected to
your router are part of the LAN network (your home network)
and your modem and your router are connected to the WAN, the
Internet or the wide area network. So now if someone the Internet
were trying to get into your network through your WAN address;
say they randomly typed in 68.82.38.249 in this case, it would
run into the router firewall instead of directly into a computer
The router acts
as the mean receptionist for all the computers on your network
and only allows incoming communications that have been requested
or initiated from your own home network. For example if computer
one wants to view a web page, the router sees that the computer
at 192.168.0.100 has requested some information so it send
this request out to the Internet.
But before it does so, using something
called network address translation or Nat it reformats the
request to make it look like it's coming directly from the
WAN address 68.82.38.249 So the web server receiving that
request thinks it's coming from 68.82.38.249 and when the
web server sends back the web page to the WAN address the
router first sees this incoming information really was requested
by someone on the network and also knows to send the information
just to the computer that requested the information located
at 192.168.0.100 and not to the PC or to any other computers
on your network.
On the other hand, if
the router receives an incoming request that was not initiated
by your network, the router says and you are? I am sorry but
Mr Computer isn’t taking unsolicited communications today,
don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And the cool things
about using firewalls and home networks security is that nobody
even knows your computer exist on the other side of the router
firewall.
So the router firewall
rejects all non-requested incoming messages. Because the router
is in the way doing its job, there is no way for anyone on
the Internet to know-how may computers if any are actually
connected onto your network so it makes it really hard for
people out in the Internet to connect to any of the computers
that are on your home network. How that for security!
Now this is all great but you can
run into some problems, because occasionally you do want to
receive none requested communication, for example I like to
play games online with other people on the internet, but if
my router firewall is in the way, there is no way for them
to join the game.
If you are interested
in this, see my section on computer network ports.
Now a couple
of other important notes:
- If you need
more help navigate from our home
page and follow the links that fit your need. But don't
forget where you are now - firewalls and home networks
- Book mark this
page http://www.best-home-networking-solutions.com/firewalls-and-home-networks.html
in case you need to return to learn more about firewalls
and home networks
- If you need
a FREE computer mini course to help with
some basics sign up here:
Finally, Stay current and secure
with our FREE "Best Home Networking Solutions"
newsletter by filling in the simple form below.
If you need to get
a router or firewall, here are those links for you again in
case you missed it earlier.
Cyberguys.com
has a some great deals here...
And the other...
Of
course there is alwaus SuperWarehouse, and just like the name
suggest, they have a ton of stuff to choose from...
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