I bought norton personal firewall for my house to protect my computers. Seems that I have had a "magnet" for viruses lately.

I have five computers at home and am not sure how to set it up so that all computers are protected with one install.

Should it be:

                                      

---Internet--|--Cable Modem--|--Computer/Server Firewall Installed--|--Router--|--Rest of Network Hooked Into Router

Does this look right?

If so, then it is not working. I have two NIC cards in the server computer. The one card works, but the router is not picking up the internet connection through the other card.

Any suggestions?

    get rid of the computer/server, and hook everything into router which itself has a firewall built in if it is any decent kind of router,

    internet-cablemodem-router-server/computers

    you can still use the server as a server this way and don't have to worry about the two NIC config, i have it this way at home

      hmm. This is the way I had it at first, and yes it did work, but the firewall on the router sucks. It's a netgear piece of crap.

      so I wanted to bypass that firewall and have a norton firewall on the server and use the router as a "hub". Can it be done like this, or impossible?

        i have never had luck with the two NIC config, always had the same problem you are struggling with, my suggestion, which will cost you some money is get an 8-port linksys router, i bought one for $125 and it has a firewall built in and a nice web based configuration, the only reason i use that at home is cuz it was easier and much less expensive that a cisco router that i would prefer

          Norton Personal Firewall isn't so good. If you are wanting to use a computer as your firewall, setup a Linux or BSD system. They are more flexible than the cheap hardware firewalls and the Windows based software firewalls.

            What os are you using to run the firewall machine?

            If it's windows you need to install and configure Internet Connection Sharing. Then...once that is installed and working...you can plug nic #2 into the router. The problem with this setup is that the router you have probably runs it's own DCHP. So what you now have is something like this...

            Gateway machine
            NIC #1 has incomming cat-5 from the modem...
            NIC #2 relays (via ICS) to the router...

            ROUTER
            IN ... this comes from NIC#2 from the gateway machine
            OUTS ... these connect to your other machines....

            the problem...

            If you are using ICS to relay in the gateway machine...and you go to the router...you need to configure the router to accept DHCP and all your other machines to get ip via DHCP. The problem you may run into is that your router may be failing to get DHCP from the gateway machine and thus, no ip addys down the line. With a setup like you want...you would be much better off with a link and that way you can assign all the downstream machines their own private ip addys. (192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, 192.168.0.4) That way the gateway does all the firewall protection and also the NAT stuff and then all the downstream machines run through the link like a "splitter". You don't really need the router since the gateway machine will handle the NAT duties.

            If you need help with ICS for windows...use google. I suspect that your problem lies with ICS and/or the DHCP on the router. Both the gateway and the router are trying to do the same duties.

            good luck

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