Charlie McKay recommended a SMC barricade router/gateway.  I looked on
compusa site and it has SPI stateful packet inspection like you said.  I
will probably get one of those.

Do you happen to know about gaming on networks.  We have 2 computers and
right now we play scrabble across the internet on zone.msn.com, because if
you play on the same computer you can see what the other person has.  Well
you have to go through a lot of pages and signing in to do this and
sometimes the site goes down.  I was wondering if we had this broadband
router/ firewall if we could play a game across the network.  I just looked
at the scrabble game and under network setup it has 2 numbers apparently
between 1 and 65,535... one is the broadcast socket and one is the game
socket?  I'm not quite sure what these are but I guess I'll have to find
them out for each computer to play on the network.  I found a program the
other day on the internet that told you what your IP address and 'port'
number were, I guess I'll have to find one that tells me my broadcast and
game sockets.  I am just curious because I have no experience in actual
networking, I have just read about it in some windows 98/me books.

Oh, and by the way, I'm pretty sure charter communications uses regular
internal pci network cards with rj-45 connectors.

Thank you very much for your information,
Robert Kupferer


>From: Wayne Copeland <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: PCBUILD -
>Personal Computer Hardware discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] sharing cable or
>dsl connection Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 10:44:37 -0500
>
>To connect more than one computer to your cable/DSL modem (or router) you
>will need another piece of hardware.  The simplest thing is to get a
>hardware firewall that has some ports for connecting several PC's at once.
>This firewall will also act as a DHCP server for your computers making it
>easier for you.
>
>All the Internet traffic goes through your firewall to your ISP using only
>the IP address your ISP assigned to your cable/DSL modem so they don't know
>how many computers you are running behind your firewall.  All your PC's are
>running private IP addresses like 192.168.xxx.yyy.
>
>Since you mentioned that you are concerned with security (as we all should
>be) make sure you get a true firewall product - not just a box that will
>provide NAT & DHCP services.  A product like the Netgear FR114P or the
>D-Link DFL300 would do you nicely.  Look for the key phrase: Stateful
>Packet Inspection (SPI).  One last thing, make sure you get external
>cable/DSL modems with an ethernet port. Some companies offer internal
>modems or modems with only USB ports. External costs more but you can
>easily set up your home network with them.
>
>- Wayne Copeland

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