Hi,

I was hoping to set up a small LAN in my house. Currently I have a Netgear WGR614v6 wireless router. It connects to the cable modem and then the downstairs PC connects via Ethernet to it. I also have my upstairs PC connected via wireless.

The Netgear dishes out the IP addresses to the computers. I can ping everything from anywhere. The only thing left to do would be get the 2 computers to join the same workgroup and then I can access both computers and the printer connected to the downstairs PC.

Where I'm not so confident is how trustworthy the firewall is on this Netgear router. It says it has an SPI firewall. I'm not sure how secure it would be to start sharing files between computers with the cable modem connected. In theory the SPI firewall should be smart enough to see what connections are active and stop an out-of-the-ordinary incoming connection attempt.

There is no customization in the firewall settings whatsoever, so there is no way for me to truly restrict incoming/outgoing traffic. The SPI firewall is meant to be automatic, I think. There is port forwarding/triggering options but again, I'm not sure what it is allowing in/out by default. I'm assuming port 80 and 4xx (can't remember) for HTTP and HTTPS respectively. Possibly 21 for FTP and maybe a couple of other common ones for the likes of POP3, SMTP etc...

I assume port opening/closing is dynamic due to the nature of an SPI firewall or is there any way to find out what would be open by default?

Is it worthwhile investing in a proper router/firewall combi instead?

Thanks,

Ciaran.

That firewall should be fine on default settings it will not route traffic from you internet ip to your local lan unless you open up ports in the port forward

Thanks, good to know!