What is the best firewall?

Well, I (rather obviously) use old versions of NIS (3 and 4, to be specific). I've been running off Win 98 SE (for the gateway machie) with a slow CPU, limited RAM and an incredibly slow HDD -- all on a dial-up connection!, yet, none of what you reference has ever presented me with a problem.

 

Very clever indeed !

thanks and regards,
bill

 

Now days the sneaky ones are using IP addys in your same IP range
and in that case you can't block a broad range can you? I am confused again.

 

Okay, I'm confused, which isn't anything unusual. It's been mentioned that you shouldn't do a backtrace using your firewall backtrace feature from your machine. Then, someone mentioned that it's okay to use a feature like NeoTrace or Visualtrace, which could be on the machine. Wouldn't using either of these let the attacker know you're online.

I've been hit several times lately, from Korea and Mexico. I don't normally backtrace until I'm ready to go offline, then will check, find out where the hits originated, and go offline. I think I have a good and well set up firewall, but prefer not to tempt fate. Nothing is unbreakable.

 

Running the backtrace directly from your machine would announce your presence, so to speak. It is important that users understand this before using these features.

The suggestion here being that it would be preferable to run these types of back traces from a web based server/utility.

 

CM,
good point !!

bill