Placement of Firewalls & Routers
-
Watching theNetwork Devices video. Im little fuzzy when its said to place firewall or router on edge or outside of network. If you have a equipment rack with 5 switchs n 1 router. How is the firewall connected . Im just trying to picture where is placed n connected. thanks alex
-
Alex, an "edge router" or firewall would be on the "edge" of your network: Typically having the uplink interface(s) ("untrusted" in firewall nomenclature) onboard. Your switches would connect equipment on the internal "trusted" side of your network.
-
Alexander,
David is right on in his description! Let me add a little more detail as to you question!
Firewall placement is dependent on how you want to configure the network. Typically, more often today, you can replace the router with the firewall if your local area network has only one path in and one path out of your network. So you may see something like this order:
LAN ------switch-----firewall------ISP (Notice how the firewall separates the trusted network (LAN) from the untrusted (ISP-"Internet").
In your example, you could do several different configurations...but we'll only do a couple...
Each switch could represent a LAN in your network and connect to a port on the firewall, then the firewall is
a direct firewall between the Internet and each of the 5 separate switches.
Switches can be essentially uplinked between all the switches, then only one of the switches is connected to
the firewall. The firewall is then connected to the ISP.
The key to understanding the placement is that the firewall normally will be the only path between the inside of your network to outside of your network and all traffic must flow through it and not be able to bypass it.
Cordially,
Ronnie Wong
Host, ITProTV