DBox2 Network Security

Gregory

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I apologise if this is a silly question, unfortunatly my network skills are, well, crap. Got the Dbox connected to my old router (no firewall), in turn connected to the cable modem. Local network ip's are 192.168.1.x. I can access my Dbox (telnet, http, ftp) from my PC - and the DBox can access the Internet. What i'm wondering is if my DBox is vunerable to the outside world. Test's seem to suggest that it's not. If somebody could briefly explain the basics of this kind of network setup/security it would be greatly appreciated.
 
Your box is only reachable from outside if port forwarding is enabled on the router.
 
And lets be honest.... who would wanna hack into the useless files on the box anyway :p ... they couldnt even watch ur TV coz the connection would be too slow.

I've thought about security a number of times... and to be honest, its not really an issue.

Liam.
 
Your router is using NAT (Network Address Translation) and IP masquerading which in effect works as a simple but effective firewall. If you have no ports forwarded to you LAN (Local Area Network) IP address then that IP is not reachable from the outside world, unless it initiates the connection. This is because technicaly your LAN is not connected 'to' the internet, it can access the internet via NAT and IP masquerading and relies on your router marking the outgoing packets with an 'ID' and only passing back replies with a matching 'ID' to your LAN IP address. So if a packet arrives at a port on your router without an 'ID' generated by your router matching packets that were recently sent and you have not specificaly forwarded that port to a LAN IP the packet will be discarded.
Hope that makes some kind of sense to you.
Cheers,
Brett
 
Thanks guys, it makes a lot of sense. My networking skills have now increased +1. :)

I guess I was being a bit paranoid, the reason I asked is because sometimes when I get home from work the Dbox (with sportster 1.76.3) has come out of standby mode. I guess either it's been rebooting itself, power problems, or that someone has been sneaking into my house and watching tv. hmm..
 
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