Firewall Stealth Mode?

Not in any of the solutions I've sen, not one.

Because of what I've personally seen, including #1 above.

Such cases are very common, and as I travel all over the US, it seems to be common where I visit.

Except that I don't see any basis for your claims.

Again, I don't see that to be the case in any of the solutions I've had experience with.

How can it be "Usual" without any proof? How can you make an assumption without testing and results that are documented?

Except that I've listed solutions that work and you've listed nothing specific that doesn't work.

And nothing main-stream, that any typical user might experience, even in a business.

A guess is like an ASSumption.

It seems to be a common thing for you - you don't want to know anything with details, like what products failed vs what ones passed.

Strange, "overkill"? having a usable and fully protected network is overkill? What complete and utter BS. What's disturbing about a secure network?

Only the NAT implementations, Sebastion. Many filtering implementations on such boxes are OK, I bet.

Yours, VB.

IMHO You two obviously have some past life karma you need to resolve. Interesting that you should choose firewalls as the venue. Best wishes.

Hint: Stop trying to prove the other person wrong. Neither of you is wrong--or right. Look for a different approach. You'll find it if you are sincere.

Walterius, Old, and may have just incurred some karma of my own, in Fort Lauderdale

Don't ASSume anything.

Then you're not getting around so much or just getting the better managed/more sane clients.

OMN! May I cite from RFC 2993:

| NAT (particularly NAPT) actually has the potential to lower overall | security because it creates the illusion of a security barrier, but | does so without the managed intent of a firewall. Appropriate | security mechanisms are implemented in the end host, without reliance | on assumptions about routing hacks, firewall filters, or missing NAT | translations, which may change over time to enable a service to a | neighboring host. In general, defined security barriers assume that | any threats are external, leading to practices that make internal | breaches much easier.

NAT is not supposed to be a security measure and the real world implementations do support this view even more.

Hello world? So far there is no Personal Firewall that does not have any known critical security vulnerabilities.

The contrary dominates the real world.

Neither is it fully protected nor does implementing useless security feature add any security.

That you're claiming such without any reasonable concept?

OK, but pretty unusable. One usually cannot even reference the TCP or NAT states, TCP flags, IP options, ICMP codes and alike. Not even a "me" keyword for the router's public IP address is available

And (usually) just 20 to 30 rules? I already need 40 for egress filtering (range, broadcast, IANA reserved).

It's usually written ASS U ME :-)

Don't think so. My ASUS box here is driving Linux with netfilter, for example.

Yours, VB.

But this Linux is not factory default, is it? How much did it cost?

It is.

ASUS W500g. Round about 80,- EUR IIRC.

Yours, VB.

There is nothing to prove wrong, he's made a claim without any facts to back it up.

Well we all know how assume breaks down now don't we. Perhaps you could have at least troubled yourself to point them to that RFC in your first post?

Jason

Well, at least he should know the RFCs at all. You know, there are certain five RFCs that every system has to follow if you want to connect it to the internet, anyway else the ICANN can expel you - he should have read them and checked his system.