[syringe]

My son bought me a Netgear Modem router for me birthday ( Lovely Touch ) its all up and running, but he told me to get rid of Zone Alarm as the router has built in firewall, this I have done but you know I kinda miss those little red bars flashing away on ZA it made me feel safe. But now I have nothing visual.
My questions are as follows.
I cant seem to find any way to access the firewall for the modem, or is this permantly hidden? does it need upgrading now and again and if so does it do it automatically?
Cheers for any advice

[jeremy]

every router have a web interface, means you should put in the browser http://lanip .. also it might have a default user/password look in the manual , anyway i recommend youll still use a software firewall cuz router firewalls can only block certain incoming ports they have no application controls

[office politics]

the hardware firewall they are describing is prolly actually just NAT. When a remote user scans your WAN ip ports, they scan the router device instead of the client machines. If you have any port forward setup on your router, the scanner will find the open port. But if you block the port with a software firewall or disable the port forward, you will lose functionality of the service because it will drop the packets.

jeremy's right. your router isn't going to block any outbound packets. This would allow a trojan to send information it collected outside your network. you will need a software firewall for this.

cisco routers provide Access Control Lists ACLs to implement firewall technology.

Also i have run across a few hardware devices that analyze the data of the packet to make a decision on whether to allow the packet to pass or not.