Summary

Before investing time and money into a firewall, you need to make sure you understand where the firewall will be in your network and which will be the best solution for your organization. There are many different types of firewalls, including hardware and software, freeware or commercial, and application proxy or packet filtering. Various solutions will be covered throughout this book. They include Linux Iptables and Ipchains, Solaris built-in firewalling, Cisco PIX, Microsoft ISA Server, and Check Point FW-1. Firewalls not only depend on where you put them on your network, but how they are configured and what you use them for. Just remember that a firewall is only as good as its rule set.