Re: Broadband Router/Firewall

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Stephen Lee wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I got my Yahoo! BB ADSL connection last week, and is considering getting
> a broadband router.  Upon some research I found that there are basically
> two price ranges: the more expensive ones with "Stateful Inspection"
> firewalls, and the cheap ones with just packet filtering (or none at all).
> 
> Also, the ones that comes out pre-Usen/Yahoo! have lower throughput
> (designed just for Flet's ADSL's 1.5Mbps downlink).
> 
> I am thinking of getting the more expensive type, but would like to get
> some opinions.
> 
> 1. Is Stateful Inspection worth the extra 15,000 yen or so?  Should I
> forget it and just get a cheap NAT/Masq box?

on the one hand, $150 extra for stateful inspection sounds like a good
deal, but on the other hand, unless you've got static IPs with servers on
them behind that router, it probably doesn't matter - for outbound-only
traffic from your internal network, the masquerading/NAT should be
adequate protection since none of those boxes have public IP addresses.

> 
> 2. Anyone has experience with Allied Telesis's AR320?  It seems to be the
> most featureful but has only 10Mbps interfaces on both sides, so I am
> worried about its throughput.

If you're getting DSL in japan that can saturate a 10 megabit link, I'm
moving back there :)  I seriously doubt it'd be a problem otherwise.

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com>
Director of Information Technology, Director of Research and Development
ITIsOpen, Inc. - http://www.itisopen.com
Cisco Certified Network Associate, Sun Solaris Certified Systems Administrator