NAT hardware firewall? Any good recommendations at a decent price for a poor farm boy in Vermont? 2 lines of defense make good sense to me, Cheerio, Jack
That's a great school of thought. The more levels of security, the better. One thing you'll notice when you eventually put your machines behind a NAT router is that the firewalls on the machines suddenly go silent. This is obviously because any "unsolicited" traffic such as port scans and the like are filtered at the router, before they reach any of the machines.
I'd go as far to say that you don't need a software firewall on your machines if you're sure you won't be getting infected with keyloggers etc, but the extra protection can't hurt. Personally, I don't run software firewalls on any of my machines, though I do enable the Windows Firewall on my laptop if I go mobile with it.
You can get wired NAT routers and wired and wireless NAT routers. If you aren't planning on using wireless then obviously you don't need one or you can disable the Wi-Fi radio. If you do go wireless then securing it is as simple as enabling WPA and using a strong password like those based on raw material from
here. Set it and forget it.
I don't live in the U.S. so I'm not sure what they cost over there, but Netgear or Belkin are the most commonly used and the Netgear WRT-54G can be picked up fairly cheaply.