Firewall really necessary?

[eliott]

On 4/12/08, dchapiesky at juno.com <dchapiesky at juno.com> wrote:
>
>
> In my humble opinion...
>
> It is always best to have a firewall between you and the outside world.  In
> some circumstances, two firewalls back to back is even better (make sure the
> two are from different manufacturers...)
>
> The folks at http://www.metasploit.com/ work on tools which exploit open
> ports and even with so few ports available, your system could be used as a
> "zombie" tool by malicious people.
>
> So, put a firewall in, or install some kind of syslog filter/analyser which
> will at least notify you of weird things going on...
>
> Daniel

pf, for instance, also has the ability to 'scrub' packets (normalize
them) before they are handed up to the rest of the stack.