fractaltiger's Journal: Home lan ready

Cool. I fixed up my home lan last night slightly after setting up my DSL. Then I tested it moving files around and printing to the living room printer and checking my router's logs of internal activity.

It was pretty nice to check out homestarrunner.com and DL a few of the Flash animations there. They're big but it's nice to skip the load time. Cool. It's nice to have freed our phone line so that my cell phone's sucky indoor reception isn't as needed at night.

PS: should i install a firewall? My router has a built in one. What else does zonealarm offer?

Firewall and ZoneAlarm

[Idlechat]

The nice thing about Zone Alarm is that it tells you which program wants to connect to the net and it can disallow them to do so. But... I suspect that it won't work with smart viruses because those can impersonate other programs. Ask yourself if you want that.

The most important thing is to block all those nasty ports like 135 (NetBios) that viruses use for reproduction. And I assume your router already does that..

Thanks

[fractaltiger]

Hey idlechat, thanks for replying! I'll check out Zone Alarm then. I have a trial version on the DSL CD. My router is an SMC networks one with some moderate complexity settings. It doesn't keep a full IP/port log, even though it has a firewall, but it lets me block fixed sites, lock MAC addresses to dynamic IPs and define a limited number of blocks and permissions.

Let's say I wouldn't be able to tell if XP's port 5000 something is trying to dial home from using its firewall alone --I'd just be able to bl

Re:Thanks

[Idlechat]

You're welcome.

Some more comments: There's a free version of ZoneAlarm which lets you block by programs (instead of ports). It's neat because it lets programs open ports at will (like the DCC ports for IRC) but that its weakness too.

And yes, you should block all the ports and open only the ones you need (http, bittorrent, etc). And the winXP firewall is very easy to maintain.. there isn't much to configure.