I tried installing pfsense earlier but I saw zero point in doing so. And skipped very soon. I want to use firewall at my home. Why should I use firewall? What are benefits? Since I can block ports access via linux firewalld (on rocky 9), why do I need another firewall software? I am genuiinely concerned about learning firewall because i get asked about networking concepts time and again. I want to find a use case so i can learn by hands on way.
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The beginnings of an answer
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The page @pscar13 linked to has a ton of great info on it. Here’s a few more reasons:
-you like networking, security, and technology and setting up and maintaining a firewall will give you hands-on practice
-you get to choose the hardware and can migrate your firewall installation with ease to new hardware if you want or need to. No more cheap plastic routers with dead-end hardware.
-consumer routers get limited firmware support. Manufacturers typically stop releasing firmware updates within a couple of years. IPFire gets roughly 8-10 updates per year, every year.
-you can be sure the security will be better than any consumer router. How many times have we heard about backdoors being discovered in consumer routers? Or things like WAN-side access or UPnP turned on by default?
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To have a secure network that is also fast.
Think about it the other way around: You will be exposed to the Internet to a countless number of threats, bad people, and you will sooner or later have those systems exploited because they are not designed to be out in the open internet.
A firewall really isn’t optional.
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If you have one device in your local network only, you can do the firewalling, security, … on your personal system. That’s true. But
- if you add more devices, you have to do this on all systems;
- you are at your own in selecting security mechanisms, with IPFire there is a great community with you;
- the IPFire device is a dedicated system and running independent from the OS and programs on your personal computer(s).
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This is a great question Jungroo. And it applies to small family networks as well. I think we could work at richer answers. Even in circumstances where one is not running any Internet servers or not yet supporting remote access. People will say “Well the ISP gives you a firewall in their modem, why waste your time?” I have a sense of multiple different important benefits for putting IPFire between us and the world. But I’d like to see a really good document on this.
hello everyone
I held a presentation back in 2016 called a firewall in every home
it was intended to raise awareness among people about protecting their home networks
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local logging.
personal rules on allowed programs thats external from your computer.
addon for customizations.
filters for control of content.
control of dns servers
speed.
offloading cpu usage to another computer.
etc.
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