How to set up a hardware firewall + Fios

[masteroc]

Just to jump straight into the matter at hand, I have Fios (Internet/TV/Phone). What I would like to do is use one of my old comps as a hardware firewall between my network and the internet. At first I thought that I could take the Fios router out completely and just replace it with my hardware firewall. That is, however, until I realized that doing so would cut off my TV and Phone...something about data over coax (some acronyms were thrown around on the sites I researched).

The next option that I came up with would be to have the fios router feed directly into my hardware firewall and just have the fios router's firewall set to completely open. My problem with this is twofold. First off, I do not have enough ethernet cards..or the slots to support all the cat5e that is wired through my house (these connections would be made in the garage). Secondly, and one of the main reasons for this as well, is that I play a lot of games...both computer and Xbox....and would like to keep latency down (through QoS as well). It occured to me that adding an additional step, or two into the network would increase my latency which would make this whole endeavour futile.

Any advice or suggestions would be great.

-Thanks

P.S. I have a few old spare computers and some extra routers/swtiches hanging around if any of that could be used to help with this.

 

[moshkid213]

Using layer 4 software to replace layer 3 hardware isn't a great idea. A Firewall has to do with permissions, ports, contexts. Etc.

Its the seperation between the trusted and untrusted side of your network, and In big business cases, it works as a "Transcoder" if you will, for VLAN's. Such as VLAN58 is Voice inside your network, well, outside your network VLAN 60 is voice. (Im not sure if its actually 60, I forgot), the packet will come in, and the firewall will either forward it to VLAN 58 on your trusted side, or if the IP is not trusted, then it will drop the packets.

Hope this helped.

I would just use a software firewall if you don't want to buy one, on your individual machines.

*Edit*

Forgot to mention, Firewalls won't route. Lol. Theres no routing protocol in a firewall, definitely not in what your trying to do. So replacing your router with it would be out of the question.

 

[masteroc]

Sorry if I did not clearly state what I am replacing my current FIOS router with. I plan to replace it with a spare computer running either smoothwall or pfsense. Both of these are operating systems build off FreeBSD that offer both firewall and advanced routing capabilities (along with a long list of other features). So in short, I know that I can't replace a router with a firewall, Im just having trouble replacing the FIOS router with an open source alternative due to the fact that FIOS also connects my TV and Phone.

-Thanks