On 19 Mar 2005, at 20:43, Jonathan Berry wrote:
I would highly suggest buying a hardware NAT router. You should be able to get one very inexpensively, the non-wireless ones are very cheap now. Of course, to use this, you must use broadband and connect to the internet through your network. That is, if you have a cable/DSL modem connected to your computer with an ethernet cable. The NAT router should protect you very well, even Windows boxes. Granted, it is hard to get through, but not impossible.
Although NAT provides some kind of protection to inside hosts, since they use martian, non-routable addresses, it creates more problems than it solves: mainly, it breaks tne end-to-end paradigm of IPv4 and forces the creation of kludges like NAT-Traversal, encapsulation of PPP over UDP/IP for L2TP tunnels, UPnP and many other extensions to cope with them.
