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Originally Posted by Jimbo
What's wrong with using a software firewall? Adding additional security measures is hardly ever a bad thing. It might not work as well as a hardware firewall, but it's not necessarily gonna make things worse. That said, I believe that most household routers actually do use software (or firmware) firewalls, and actual hardware firewalls are distinguished from routers.
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In and of itself, nothing is wrong with using a software firewall. It's certainly better than nothing. My comment was in reference to someone preferring such over a hardware firewall, should that person have access to the latter. It makes about as much sense as someone sticking the family jewelry in a box in their bedroom, locking the bedroom door, and then leaving the front door of their house unlocked.
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Originally Posted by Jimbo
And as to anything LAN related, a router technically splits up networks into different broadcast domains. You're describing a switch (common misconception about most household "routers", don't feel bad about it). The common "router" is actually a 4-port switch with a routing unit between the various LAN ports and the single WAN port. The one tricky part of the common household wireless router is putting wireless and wired networks on the same broadcast domain. Typically different media types are on separate networks and require a router to go between them; however, in this case the router takes the two different media and shares a broadcast domain across both of them.
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I believe the distinction here is that one of these home routers has a) some kind of firmware to allow for configuring it, and b) support for NAT and port forwarding. A plain old switch is much simpler, but then you have smarter ones, like layer 3 switches. The way I tend to think of it is that a router is essentially a very specialized switch, with additional intelligence, and while not technically correct, it helps illustrate the blurring of definitions.