Re: The Dreaded Personal Firewall

When you say protecting machine from machine on the network, do you
mean there would be no access from one machine to another at all? You
don't have a server of any kind, that is accesible from all the
machines in the network?

I think that protecting machines from one another is not required when
you have a solution that protects all the machines. I think that a
stateful inspection firewall and a gateway antivirus, combined with an
anti-spyware software on all the computers would do the trick. Some
appliances can let you block incoming and outgoing connections per
service. For instance, you can block all MSN and P2P traffic and set
the AV to scan incoming and outgoing email and you're about done. The
last thing would be to add anti-spyware protection on all the
computers, and I would recommend an antivirus software on them (never
rely ONLY on the gateway AV) and you're done.

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All in all, creating a network where all the computers are "protected"
from one another is possible, through VLANs, internal VPN and whatnot.
But I recommend protecting the network as a whole.

.

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