Greg Bockelman said:
Well, my laptop goes on the road with me, and probably no hardware firewall with the wireless systems I use. Maybe they do, but I am not sure. I will leave Windows Firewall on for that, but on my home stuff I won't worry about it.
Thanks again for the input, guys.
If you're connecting in to networks on someone elses wireless, then you are probably already behind their firewall. However, the fact that you use wireless is itself a reason to have a software firewall running - because the wireless network may not be secure.
Heck, just the fact that you're plugging into strange networks is enough reason to play it safe and have it running, even hardwired in.
More explanation on firewalls (simplified somewhat): The firewall in the airplane is designed to keep a fire in the engine forward of the passenger compartment. A computer firewall is designed to keep the fire on the public internet outside of your private network.
Your computer connects to the wide area network (internet) through a gateway, and traffic is able to flow two ways through that gateway. That point of entry, the gateway point, has an IP. That gateway point might be your PC, or it might be your hardware firewall or your router, but it has a single IP through which all traffic to your computer (and if you have a network, your network) flows.
Traffic can be incoming or outgoing. The direction is determined not by the flow of data, but by the initiatior of the contact. If you browse to PoA, you open a connection to PoA's server, and that connection (kind of like a phone call) stays open until we're done. You call us, and we talk back and forth. Thats an outbound connection. On the other hand, if PoA tried to call you, that would be an inbound connection.
Firewalls block connections. Mainly inbounds but they can block in either direction.
Each IP has a number of ports. A port is kind of like an extention on a telephone exchange. When you browse to POA, you connect to the IP mapped to
www.pilotsofamerica.com and you then connect to port 80, the standard HTTP port. Its like calling an office and asking for Joe Smith at extention 5080, only its all hidden from you - but its 1 phone # and thousands of extentions. (1 IP, 32767 ports, to be exact).
The standard household hardware firewall allows ALL outbound calls and NO inbound calls. If you want to run a web server on port 80, your firewall has to be adjusted to allow calls on port 80 in, because running a web server means your server has to be the 800 number and answer the calls, it can't initiate them.
The software firewalls tend to be a bit more dynamic - they run directly on your computer and monitor direct access to and from your computer using your computers CPU cycles to do so. This allows them to be more interractive and say, "Hey, do you REALLY wanna call up
www.haxubadroxorlolol.com on port 9218?" (which no, you don't) when the request is going out, but the cost of course is your comp runs a bit slower overall cause it has more work to do. Very good when your computer goes with you to strange networks...
