Router Setup and Security

[Oddysey]

Ralph;

In general, wireless encryption shouldn't add more than 1% to your total time to to transfer data - it should be invisible, timewise, for all practical concerns.

The debate rages on over whether WEP or WPA is the better method, so I'll let you decide for yourself. My Netgear router only came with WEP, so I took the 128 bit method, and all is well for me.

But be aware that a hardware firewall can't protect you from virii, trojan horses, worms, etc. They only do one thing, and that is keep out unrequested packets. If something is coming along for the ride with a requested stream (an HTML page, for example), the firewall will gladly let it through. After all, you requested that page, so everything on it must be OK! Stupid, I know, but that's the current state of the art.

And it's why we have Proxo to monitor the data stream itself (on Port 80) - there's where the filters do the job of scuttling the bad-guy stuff.

As for any other Port, you'll need a software firewall, either on your machine, or on a gateway machine between you and the hardware firewall, to check those data streams.

Good luck, and keep us posted.


Oddysey