Originally posted here by Mahakaal
Could I get something better? And also is there any benefit in using multiple firewalls at the same time?
I have a little Smoothwall (www.smoothwall.org) box serving as a gateway (lan to ADSL). Smoothwall features Snort for intrusion detection and acts as a firewall. There are a few boxes behing my Smoothie and one of them is a (burb) WinXP box. Since that is my main workhorse, I have Norton Internet Security 2003 (since a couple of days). So I use a double firewall and the Norton firewall has not much to do, but I like to have control over software accessing the internet, as well as the anti-virus stuff. Call me paranoid, but I like it this way.
For my situation, the double firewall is beneficial but in all honesty...the second firewall doesn't do anything 'cause Smoothie does a good job keeping the bad guys out. It also seems that my Alcatel ADSL modem does something firewall-ish. Not sure though...

Maybe my setup is a little over the top, but I still need NIS to keep banners away, privacy control and anti-virus, so it's not entirely useless. And I'm not a security expert so I follow the 'better safe than sorry' policy...