Comment on Finally installed my own Firewall
whimsy@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Networking isn’t my strong suit, so this might be a stupid question. But what exactly is a hardware firewall? Is it the same thing as my Internet facing router blocking incoming packets which haven’t been requested from “inside the home” network?
A hardware firewall generally indicates a standalone appliance that is dedicated to being a firewall. Not to be confused with a software firewall as you would see with UFW, or Windows Defender. Modern routers do possess some of the same tenets of a hardware firewall, but a dedicated hardware firewall usually gives a broader range of defenses such as IDS/IPS, filtering, etc.
I have a dedicated hardware firewall in the form of pFsense. The ‘black box’ in OP’s picture is the hardware firewall.