How many firewalls?

nitz12

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 4, 2007
Messages
88
If I have 6 machines on a wired network connected to either the primary router or switch, does every machine need to be firewalled? It seems that whenever there are problems in the network, I find that the firewall has somehow reactivated itself and all order is restored once I disable the firewall. But am I putting security of the network at risk?
 
A firewall is designed to keep bad things away from the PC. If you have a firewall between your LAN and the internet, all your machines are protected from the internet. If you put additional firewalls on the individual machines on the LAN, you're protecting them from other PCs on the LAN.

It's additional security (if something bad happens to get on one, the extra firewalls may help save the other PCs), but generally the other PCs on the LAN will be considered good, trusted machines. It's also a backup in case there's a bug in the primary firewall that lets something bad through.
 
Hopefully you do have a router, home grade routers by default run as a gateway, and have NAT...so by default all unsolicited inbound traffic is stopped (all 65,000 plus ports blocked). That's your primary concern, so now your entire network is "hidden" from the internet.
 
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