Sonic WALL

I didn't worry about firewalls at all when I was accessing the internet through a dialup modem (9600 baud was fast at the time). After all, I got charged by the hour by America Online, so I was not for long periods of time. Just long enough to check my email, download a few files and catch up on some news.

Later, I moved to other ISPs, but continued to use a dialup modem to access the internet. I had no worries, except for pesky viruses, but those were covered by Norton Antivirus (an excellent product, by the way).

One day I discovered that DSL was going to be installed in my area. I was incredibly excited - I could be connected to the internet at all times. Downloads would be fast, surfing almost instantaneous, and life would be great (I truly am a computer geek).

I did a little research while I was waiting for the service to be installed (I was the first home in my area to get DSL) and quickly concluded that a firewall is essential. In fact, not having a firewall is living on borrowed time. Your system is wide open to the world without protection, and hackers will find it soon enough.

Once DSL was installed and working, I purchased a copy of WRQ At-Guard (since purchased by Symantec and merged into their Internet Security product) and installed it on my system. At-Guard was a nice firewall, except that it asked way too many questions. After a few months, I switched to BlackIce, then later to Zone Alarm.

None of these software solutions were worth anything. In fact, all of the software solutions were too intrusive, caused my system to crash or behave strangely or simply didn't do what was needed. 

I was fed up with these products and did some more research. After a while, I stumbled on something called the Sonic Wall. This is an appliance that sits between your computer and the internet, blocking anything and everything from the outside, unless you specifically want it to get to your system (useful for web servers and the like).

The new firewall was trivial to set up. I just took it out of the box, plugged it into the wall, plugged my DSL modem in one end and the computer in the other, turned it on and attached to it via Internet Explorer.

It took me about twenty minutes to configure via a simple and clean interface. I was happy to find the appliance also included a DHCP server (which allows all of my home computers to be dynamically assigned a TCP/IP address on boot) and a NAT server (which allows all of my home computers to attach to the internet at the same time over a single TCP/IP address). It also hides my systems quite well in stealth mode, meaning that they are totally invisible on the internet, except for the ports which are explicitly open for web and email services. This was verified using the port tester at http://www.grc.com and by my own experimentation.

Am I happy with this solution? You bet - it's worked perfectly and has been totally reliable since the day it was installed.

Additional Information

• Firewalls protect your system You must protect your system with a personal firewall, especially if you are using DSL or cable modem.
• Products - ZoneAlarm Pro ZoneAlarm Pro is quite possibly the best firewall product for personal home use that currently exists. Highly recommended.