Physical Firewall

[SilverTurtle]

A friend was telling me today, that the best way to protect ones computer from hacking and whatnot is to hook up the internet to an old computer you have without a hard drive, and then connect the rest of the computers through that. if someone tries to hack, he cant go past the old computer which u have nothing to loose on.

Is this true? and if so, how exactly do u set it up

 

[Shakie]

How do you configure it as a firewall without a harddrive?

 

[ekÆsine]

your friend is wrong or you completely misunderstood him.

 

[shemcomputers]

There is no way to set up a computer as a gateway or router without some type of software and to host this software you have to have some type of physical media, which would be a hard-drive. I'm not familiar of any other way to have a computer load without an operating system unless you're using a bootable floppy, CD, zip, or some other media other than a hard-drive. Though, I believe you might be able to store info as well as operating systems on these removable USB memory sticks which possibly can be used as mobile operating systems, which would allow for a system to be operable without a hard-drive. Still, the simplest solution to this all is to attach a hardware firewall to the network...because that seems to be the same as what your friend is talking of. In any system there must be a way to get in, because if there wasn't then there wouldn't be a way to get out...so all computers and networks are vulnerable but not all vulnerabilities are exploited in a computer or network. This is the truth about computer security.

 

[Qiranworms]

Basically this computer is becoming a router. First thing, I do not see how this could work without some sort of router software, hence the lack of the OS (hard drive). Secondly, I see that getting past this system would be an equal challenge to getting past a NAT device (ie. a standard router).

Interesting, though.