According to most posts, people believe that getting a firewall will protect you from everything and that you won't have to reboot your computer or anything. Well, that could be true in some DoS cases, DoS only comes from one person, is much less harmful than DDoS. DoS usually depends on the person being attacked having a lower quality internet connection, if somebody on cable was trying to take down somebody on DSL, with or without a firewall it would most likely not work, and vice versa. Because that one person can only send out so much traffic at one time, though DoS attacks are still possible on dial-up users, but then again, with dial-up all a user must do is disconnect and logon again, and will then have a new IP address and the person trying the attack will not know what the new IP address is. So I don't think DoS attacks are that dangerous. Though firewalls may be effective against DoS attacks even they can't really cope with DDoS attacks.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks are pretty dangerous. They usually depend on people infecting other people's computers's. People usually send trojans that communicate with the person who sent the trojan, telling him they are online, and that they are available to attack a person. Often these infected computers logon to an IRC network, because it is fast, easy, and on things like ICQ you have to have people on buddy lists to organize a network of people. YOU CAN AVOID INFECTION WITH GOOD ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE! So first thing, go save yourself some bandwidth loss, by getting antivirus software and scanning your computer, and also save other people, DDoS attacks can't happen as often if people don't let them. Also uninstall and then reinstall your antivirus software, the reason being people often send out other programs with trojans, that are designed to compromise antivirus software and firewalls. Also, check out any programs that may be running on start up, because if you can do that then you can probably stop most trojans without the need of a firewall or antivirus software. To check for trojans on start up try checking autoexec.bat, any bat files, and win.ini, and if you find any files you find to be suspicious, then make a post asking about them or go to a search engine.
With DDoS people with broadband connections could team up to amass the collective bandwidth power of an OC3 line, (NEVER get the user of an OC or DS line mad at you, trust me, they have enough bandwidth to either knock you offline, or at least make you lag to a 28k connection )
Before I go any further, IF YOU THINK YOU ARE BEING DDoS'D THEN CALL YOUR ISP! THEY CAN HELP!
And now what I really wanted to talk about, firewalls users being DDoS'd. I do not know what most people think about the two, but let me tell you what I know. Even with firewalls, you can still be affected by these attacks, especially if you are using a slower computer, like me. Firewalls still have to block those packets, and in some ways this is even worse, because when a firewall is trying to block all these packets (or absorb them depending on your firewall) it puts a strain on your computer, processing power and all, and if you do not have enough to spare, then you might be out of luck. You may be forced to reboot, because all those system resoucres being eaten up by the firewall may make your computer unstable. However, if you have a new computer, you may being with a firewall, you may be almost impervious to these attacks. I know that when I was using zone alarm pro, on this computer, 133mhz, 32 megs of ram, I had to reboot when I was DDoS'd.
I hope this helped explain some of the limitations of firewalls. Bye.