Re: Router vs stingray...

Real nwsy wrote:

> My setup - win2k machine in lounge mobo based nic xovered to win98 original
> machine in bedroom. Stingray/frog delivered ADSL ICS'd happily between
> machines. No problems at all with any of this. Since I set DNS & Gateway
> IP's on the win98 machine, its been even more stable/speedy than before.

I got my green frog stable but it took a lot of effort and even then
connecting the digtal camera would trip it out , however I have now
switched to a cheap Conexant chipset 4 ethernet + 1 usb port router
which I find much superior.

Advantages
More stable up time tends to be measured in weeks, I'm now able to
download 650mb Linux distribution ISO images without it even crossing
my mind it might go down.

Less load on the hosting machines cpu, all the signal processing in the
routers dedicate signal processing cpu not the general purpose cpu on pc
its attached to. This isn't important for ordinary sites but some sites
like eBay and games sites which constantly refresh can put very high
continuos loads on the hosting machines cpu.

Firewall --the router has a built in NATS firewall, not 100% secure but
enough to block 99.99% of attacks, leaving the firewall software (in my
case Kerio) to deal with any threats that do get through - defense in
depth. This also frees up more CPU time on the client PCs. If you want
evem more protect it is easy enough to put and IP Cop/Smoothwall pc
between you and the roter.

Linux -- connecting a Linux pc is a breeze compared to setting up a USB
ADSL modem under Linux, not so much plug and play as just boot the
computer and instant internet.




awm

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 20:50:25 +0100, "Real nwsy"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>"awm" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>> I got my green frog stable but it took a lot of effort and even then
>> connecting the digtal camera would trip it out , however I have now
>> switched to a cheap Conexant chipset 4 ethernet + 1 usb port router
>> which I find much superior.
>
>Not come across any problems of this nature. Are the frogs known to be that
>unstable? Any reason anyone can think of why mine's been solid as a rock for
>the whole four years?

The frogs pull pretty much maximum power from the USB port (500 mA)
and are known to cause some motherboards problems because of that.

They also run fairly warm, and less-than-ideal siting (ie no
ventilation) will cause them to overheat.

Also, to the best of my knowledge (which may be slightly out of date),
the frog drivers are not designed to work on multi-processor machines,
and consequently don't.


--
(this space for rant)

"tHatDudeUK" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:bj6bpl$fnp5h$(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hardware firewalls vary greatly from a basic NAT configuration (meaning
> outside machines cannot directly connect to your machine given the nature
of
> the connection) which really isn't all that secure and you are still
> vulnerable to ping attacks, trojan horses, nasty spamware (or spyware) and
> the like.

Ooops, forgot to say what they vary to :-)

You can also get port blocking type setup's, usually an inherent part of
NAT. If you wanted to run a webserver, you'd have it set-up to direct port
80 incoming connections to your webserver... Other connections can be
denied.

Another step is SPI (stateful packet inspection) I know little about it but
it inspects packets somehow and determines if they are legitimate and blocks
them if they aren't. Also Dos/DDoS protection is possible.

These things usually wouldn't stop a trojan calling home, eg. sending
keylogs etc, but it may hamper their ability to connect to you etc... A good
AV program would hopefully stop this anyhow and coupled with Ad-aware and a
low amount of paranoia you can get away with a good AV and a good h/w
firewall (not just NAT.)