Hardware firewall?

[Apokarteron]

what is a hardware firewall? Norton, McAfee etc. make them, their for enterprise pompanies and cost like $400.
what do they do exactly? are they as reliable as software firewall?

 

[super_xero]

i think they are used for like business ect so harware can not be hooked up to the network and stuff it gives the power like a firewall insted of accesing webpages to decline acces to hardware

 

[Byteman]

Software firewalls, (curse them all) work by monitoring port communication on a computer and allow or disallow access according to how it is setup, they also will have rules you can setup etc...

Hardware firewalls are not on your computer but reside on a device (usually a router). SPI firewalls, (my favorite), block all incomming ports by default, and basically monitor traffic comming from the inside (your computer), and allow the responses to your computers outbound traffic, in! Hence all inbound traffic that was not initiated from your computer first, is blocked. Companies use hardware firewalls because of the shear amount of traffic flowing through the connection. At home, I prefer to use a hardware firewall (SPI) as well (on my dsl router). That way i don't have to deal with "training" a software one. But many prefer installing a software one... your choice.