Help with a science project

Hello all:

I'm going to be working on an extended science project for high school, and I would like to, among other things, test the strengths of many commercially available firewalls. I plan to network a few computers, and it would be ideal if I could use one to attempt to connect to some of the ports that are often attacked online. I would like to show that, without a firewall (or even with some less effective firewalls), it is easy for someone to access and exploit these system ports. The systems will probably run 98SE and thus not have XP's built in firewall. Although I have figured out how to ping another computer (via DOS and various websites), I don't know how to attempt to connect to these ports.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Hi,

Not much to attack, then. Unbind netbios from TCP/IP and there are no open ports left...

Have a look at nmap

Greetings, Jens

Ok, thanks guys! Anyone else have experience with this?

Pretty aggressive project.

For that a simple hub/switch will work. Make one machine the gateway for the other boxes. Target boxes can have static ip address.

Is SE more prevalent than say win98? Of course you could have a different os on each computer.

nmap utility can be used to indicate open/closed/filtered ports

You could setup the firewall to log the attempts from the target boxes to show what ports try to connect to the internet.

Telnet could be used to show response (if any) when you connect to a port.

tcpdump can show contents of a packet from a box.

Hope the project is not due in a week or two.

Does not sound like a good HIGHSCHOOL project.

This is professional stuff, requiring years of study in IT.

Come back in 20 years.

For now, maybe it's more appropriate to build a computer from cardboard, wood and paper ?

You and/or your teachers underestimate the profession heavily.

frgr Erik