Hi, i personally find it very dangerous, leaving ports 135-139 and 445 opened on a server. If you use on the same machine http for external access (as a webserver) and samba for internal, my purpose is to install a second network interface for you internal lan und making your machine routing (if you use this machine as your access to internet too..) like this, you would only need to open port 80 (http) and 443 (https)and could close all ohther ports on the external interface. but you can leave all ports openend on your internal interface (i suppose this is your homelan) or can have your ports for samba and ipp-printing (works fine even on windows xp and for printing you don't need samba...) you can also have your port 631 opened. Tell me, if i wrote to complicated... HTH Roger
