Hardware Firewalls
Hardware firewalls, or firewall appliances as they are more commonly known, are
dedicated devices whose sole function is to implement a pre-determined access control policy. Of course any piece of hardware is virtually useless without software, and so is the case of a firewall appliance. Although most firewall appliances are plug_and_play, there still is a requirement to interface with them through the software in order to configure them to your security policies. This interface can be a Graphical User Interface (GUI) as in the case of SonicWall's firewall appliances (Fig. 5a)
Figure 5a. Screen shot from SonicWall creating access rules with objects.
or Command Line Interface (CLI) as in the case of the Cisco PIX line of firewall appliances. There are programs available, however, that allow you to program PIX products via the more user-friendly GUI.
A fully featured firewall appliance will include NAT (Network Address Translation), DMZ......
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