NOD 32 v3 and soft/firm fire wall?

[power_man]

I use NOD 32 and am very happy. I also use Zone Alarm Pro for a fire wall. Recently I bought a Linksys WRT310N router, but still use Zone Alarm for the heck of it.

I went to Upgrade to the latest version of ZA and now my installation is all jacked up....

Any way, my real question is do I even need to run a software fire wall? It is for my XP SP3 desktop and a Vista laptop. Is NOD32 sufficient to block incoming threats and leave the fire wall up to the router.

Thanks for any input.

[jimwillsher]

Is your WRT310N running in NAT mode? If it is then your software firewall is utterly useless since your router will only allow in what you've requested out.

[power_man]

Ilooked it up. It isn't on by default, and since I didn't know what NAT was, I know I didn't enable it. Don't know if it would be good to have it on or not.

[jimwillsher]

That's unusual, most "soho" routers have it enabled by default.

What is the IP address of your computer, is it a 192.168.x.x address, or a 10.0.x.x address?

(on Windows: Start, run, CMD <enter> then IPCONFIG <enter>

If it is, then you're using NAT.

[power_man]

Ya, it's 192. And I had to look it up when I got home. It was a filter, not NAT.

[jimwillsher]

Ok, so if your computer is a 192.x address then that's a non-routable address. That means that nobody on the internet can possibly access your PC *unless* you specifically request it (or you set up forwarding rules in your router).

So I think you're quite safe.



Jim