A personal firewall will have a variety of levels of protection that depends on whether your computer is connected to the Internet or to a network. A computer on a home network will often have shared files with other computers on the network and will also access the same resources, such as printers. If this is the case there will be more access than if the computers are connecting to the Internet.
Connecting to the Internet is risky and needs to be controlled. Firewalls should be set to restrict certain data that is outgoing and incoming as well as close any ports that aren’t being used. A port is a standardized number that routes Internet traffic with the use of network software.
You don’t need to be a computer expert. Most firewall settings are configured according to default. If you need to modify these settings you’ll usually get an alert when you’re making the change.
There are two basic components to a personal firewall. The first component will look at the data when it comes into your computer to decide whether or not the data should be allowed to pass through. The second component will set up certain policies for some applications. These policies can be relaxed since they simply let certain programs have access to the Internet.
The first component is known as the “packet filter”. This filter will take a look at each packet of data and will let it pass through or let it drop. These packets are composed of data that is routed on the network. There are rules for these packets, which are called polices, that let data pass or decide which data fails to meet the policy standards. Failure to meet these policies will give an alert or else just drop the packet depending on how the firewall has been configured.
The second component is known as the “application filter”. This filter will decide whether certain programs are allowed to receive and send data through one port or another. A browser will need to have access to the Internet so a policy is put into place that allows the receiving and sending of data using Port 80, which is a standard number.
Just because the web browser is using Port 80, and other ports are blocked by the personal firewall, your computer still won’t be secure.
An application filter is set up for certain programs and not the particular components of these programs. Every program will have more than one module, each of which can be infected. In a Windows environment these are known as DDLs (dynamic link libraries).
In most cases your antivirus software will be able to determine if a module is infected but any new viruses, that are not yet part of the antivirus database, may slip by undetected. Your computer system will be vulnerable if your personal firewall allows this to happen.
A firewall won’t give you complete protection against viruses and hackers. A firewall is only effective for keeping some hackers out of your system and you should supplement your system with antivirus software. You should also practice safe file sharing procedures.
There is one main rule to follow with firewalls: If you don’t know what is trying to accessing your computer consider it a risk.
By: Paul Wilcox
Posts Tagged ‘Failure’
Using Firewalls to Protect Your Computer From Attack
March 22nd, 2010Computer Home Business – What Does it Take to Make Money From Home?
March 2nd, 2010
Starting a computer home business is a very worthwhile endeavor, at least for some people. For others, it seems like they can work hours and hours and not have a dime to show for their efforts. Why is this?
There are a few reasons, in my opinion. What separates successful business owners from the wanna bees? The first is what I call opportunity hopping. I came across this a lot in the network marketing industry. Everybody is looking for that latest and greatest opportunity that will make them a killing without them having to do any work.
If you are looking for network marketing opportunities, you’ve probably come across tons of different companies, and are wondering which opportunity is really the best to make money.
I’m going to let you in on a secret that they don’t want you to know-it really doesn’t matter which you sign up with. Most people think it’s all about the system, but the truth is, you can make a killing in any system on the planet.
Is this to say the system you follow isn’t important? Not at all. However, your success or failure really comes down to your ability to market. If you are a good marketer, you can make money with any company or computer home business opportunity, and if you can’t market, you won’t make a dime regardless of how great the system might be.
The most successful network marketing distributors don’t use the generic company website. Instead, they created their own sales copy, auto responders, etc, and tested them out on a bunch of different keywords to see which ones convert well and which don’t.
Once they do this, they then continue advertising on those keywords, generate leads, follow up with up with them over the phone, explain the opportunity, and generally, direct them to a company conference call. After that, they will follow up with the prospect, and hopefully get them to sign up.
This is more or less the activity you will be doing with any network marketing company. In other words, your success depends entirely on you, and not the system.
This is what separates the successful from the unsuccessful, not just in network marketing, but in any computer home business opportunity. The truth is, I’m using network marketing to make a point-most people are not willing to do the work or testing necessary to make money, and instead want that magic system to do everything for them.
The truth is, such a system doesn’t exist. If you want to make big money online or offline, and with network marketing or anything else, it will depend on you learning marketing and advertising, and in the case of network marketing, over the phone selling.
Not as easy as you thought? The truth is, if it were as easy to make money online as many would have you believe, everybody would be making money online big time. How many people do you know off hand who are making a full time income online?
Not many? Me neither. The reality is, making money online is very possible, but it will require a lot of hard work and dedication on your part, and this is how to make money with a computer home business.
By: George Mitchell
How to Deal With Dual Network Cards Conflict
December 29th, 2009
Many people now have two computers, as to enable both to access the network, they often make use of the dual network cards to connect their computers and make them as a local area network (or LAN), which would cost much less than purchase a router. However, sometimes due to the model and the quality of these two adapters or your PC compatibility problems, they have a conflict. How can we tackle it?
Using dual NIC cards to access the network is only a temporary plan, if there is some problem when applying the double cards connection, we should consider troubleshooting it from the aspects below:
Computer restart
Generally when you finish installing some software, Windows prompts you to restart; sometimes you think it a troublesome and reboot the computer till all software has been installed. You’d better restart your PC when installing the first net card and then turn to set up the next one. Because when installation is over, the system not only would assign the interrupt request and the memory available resource to you network adapter, but also configure the port and the IP for it, actually it is more convenient for your PC to carry out its work by rebooting and then installing the next adapter.
Net card speed and connections
When you build the network, you should think over the communication problem between the 10/100M and 10M network adapters: when they are interconnected in two computers, you would probably find that they are not reachable across the IP network, or they are shown connected normally but you can not browse the website. Such errors often happen when two net cards with different transmission speeds exchanging their data packs. To resolve this failure, you can try to contact your 10/100M network adapter to the external line and use an adapter with the same speed in the inner connection.
By: Molly Smith
