a friend of mine told me that if you have a router set up you no longer need a firewall (such as ZoneAlarm). is this true? he gave me no source for this information (just that he heard it from another friend who worked at some place doing network stuff), so i don''t know if i should trust it or not. obviously i have a firewall running anyway, but if it isn''t necessary i will get rid of it.

Well alot of those little personal routers have built in Firewalls, thats what the port forwarding is for, its only going to allow information on those ports to go to the computer you state in the setup..

so I would say if you have a router like that and you got it setup well then your really don''t need a firewall, but if your openning ports then it might be better to keep the ZoneAlarm going just in case it can stop something your letting in

Why in the world would someone have a built in firewall and also use a software firewall like zone-alarm on top of that? Am I missing something here?

ah, so it isn''t a router thing; he must have been referring to routers with a built-in firewall...

i will have to check then...

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Original post by Nervo
Why in the world would someone have a built in firewall and also use a software firewall like zone-alarm on top of that? Am I missing something here?

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Well ZoneAlarm goes program by program, and a Firewall is going to go by ports, so you can open many ports on your firewall but use ZoneAlarm so that only certain programs can use the open ports..

Personally I wouldn''t do it, but I''m sure someone would.. I''ve heard of people running more then 1 hardware firewall..

What ZoneAlarm and the like do is also protect you from malicious programs.

Eg If someone installs a malicious program that sends your details to a waiting server, and it sends these details over port 80 (port 80 is the default http port for most implementations and your router will probably allow traffic through) - this information will more than likely get through. What ZoneAlarm and similar firewalls do is actually inform you that someone is sending data over a port and ask you if you want to allow / deny it.

How useful this feature is to you, is your choice.

I personnally dont bother.

There are a lot of different kinds of routers, so perhaps you should find out a bit more about what your router does. On my personal network, I have a Linux machine that acts as a router that has two ethernet cards, one connected to my cable modem, one to my local network. The local network has non routable IP addresses (the 192.168.0.0/24 network) and the router performs NAT (network address translation) to give the other hosts an internet connection.

The upshot of this is that the local hosts can accept no incoming connections because they can''t be addressed from the outside. So the router basically functions as a firewall, blocking those connections. You can also have a firewall on your router so that the router itself accepts no incoming connections, or forwards connections on specific ports.