router firewall

[ammo]

I have a Linksys wireless G router and was wondering if there is a way to make sure the firewall is working?

[Panama Red]

Check in the router setup area. Your set up manual or cd will have the info. Just open your internet browser and type http://192.168.0.1 That will get you the log in screen. Use "Admin" as the user name and leave the password blank. If that doesn't work, use "password" for the password.

[bailey]

the router is a hardware firewall.
the only way to open it up is to farward a port open.
do not do anything and you will be fine.

[Rick Hall]

Just make sure NAT is enabled, if it is not, you have no firewall

[ammo]

What's NAT?

[glc]

PR: Linksys is 192.168.1.1, and you leave user name blank and use admin for the password. Different brands are different, what you said applies to a D-Link.

NAT = network address translation. It's enabled if the router works.

Look around for "discard WAN ping" or something similar. That makes you essentially invisible from the outside and should be enabled.

For a test, go to https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

[Panama Red]

Thanx for straightening me out, g. I was looking at the wrong line on my sheet!

[Rick Hall]

GLC, you say it is enabled if the router works, but you can disable it with a simple checkbox in the Linksys BEFSR41 router. I am not sure about all of the others.

[glc]

Rick, are you sure? That defeats the purpose and the functionality of the router. You sure you aren't thinking DHCP?

[Rick Hall]

Yes, I am absolutely sure. NAT is enabled by default but can be turned off. I am not talking about DHCP, I am saying that this can be done static IP's assigned.

[glc]

How can you assign static IP's when there's no NAT? If the router is passing the real IP straight through, how can you have more than one computer connected at a time?

[Rick Hall]

GLC, when I said static IP's I was talking about the IP's assigned to the computers. YES my system uses DHCP for the ISP but I can still disable NAT as you can see here

[glc]

If you do that, you are defeating the purpose of the router and only one computer will be able to access the Internet. This turns the router into a straight passthrough device, and most ISP's only give you one IP. This setting is only used when your ISP is multiple IP capable and you want all machines to have a real instead of a private IP - and if that's the case, just use a simple switch. I will guess that you could possibly use this to turn your router into a simple switch, daisy chained to another router.