Hardware firewall shenanigans

[Paradigm^]

So I am now a proud owner of my very own Intenret! I am very proud and looking forward to downe lodeing some megabytes.

Alright, in seriousness now. My shiny new wireless router comes with a hardware firewall; what do I need to open and close in order to keep things secure? At the moment it's set to allow all outbound traffic and block all inbound traffic (although for some odd reason this does not give us any problem reading the interweb, so maybe it's not set up right after all).

In any case, what should be left open and kept closed? We all have firewalls on our individual PCs connected to the router - but there's nowt wrong with another level of protection.

Muchos grassy arse.

[Timmeh]

No that's perfectly correct.

Should you need anything inbound, you'll need to open a single port/port range for it. That's only if you're hosting a server or something though really...

[Playbus]

Yep Timmeh is right. as usual :p

[Auslander]

If you wanna run P2P or games server etc. anything like that, you usually have to forward ports on the Router. Connect to it via a browser, find out what port you software will be using, and what IP addy your machine is using (ipconfig /all in cmd prompt), then enter this info in the router console.

[Eccles]

To expand on what the other guys have said...

(although for some odd reason this does not give us any problem reading the interweb, so maybe it's not set up right after all).

This is because when your computer makes an outbound request, such as fetching a web page, the router remembers where you sent the request to and on which outbound port so that when the website replies it knows to forward the traffic to the correct PC. The blocked inbound traffic rule applies to connections that are initiated from the outside.