Toga Diavolo

Welcome and please, please, PLEASE unsuck this product offering!

Alexios, Since I don't know exactly what you're trying to accomplish, it's a little difficult to help you design a rule set. SL clients are fairly straight forward and they all tend to use the same basic voice module, all of which tend to use a finite number of tcp/udp ports. (note to the person who said SL doesn't use http or https, tcp ports 80 & 443, respectively, download a copy of wireshark and scope it yourself, it does). Based on the variety of ports your talking about, it almost looks like you're trying to set up a sim server... Whole different ball of wax and if that's the case your nat router will need a DMZ port for you to pull this off. Personally, the vast majority of SoHo routers that you can pick up at best buy, or the electronics store, suck for DMZ use, in my opinion. If you have cash, I'd recommend a Juniper SSG-5. If you don't have cash and you have an old PC that has a couple of NIC's, then I'd recommend something using linux and IPtables... If you need something menu driven, takea look at ipcop. Now or a side note: Windows firewall, WHEN PROPERLY configured is actually brutally effective. Granted, it doesn't allow quite the granularity of control as a dedicated hardware firewall, and it does suck resources from the machine, but it does work. Microsoft simply provides the foundation... It's up to developers or curious people to improve upon. And since it's impossible for anybody to know what you're going to do with your PC at any given time, MS left it fairly wide open to make it easier on the end uer. For the record: A router is a protocol converter, T-1, T-3 to 802.3 A Hub is nothing more than a port replicator, where it's back plane shares a collision domain. A switch is similar to the hub in that it replicates ports however each port is its own collision domain. Routers can provide basic firewalling, however, in complex environments, they don't have the memory or the CPU power to handle large rule sets. Firewalls can provide some routing capability, in that they can do potocol and media conversion, but then you start getting into devices costing well into the upper 4 digit range. Generally not for the home environment.