Putting server on the internet or not

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 13:31:10 -0500,
  "Scot L. Harris" <webid at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> For home users one of the cheap Netgear or Linksys routers/firewalls do
> a good job.  If you want to learn more, setting up a separate box as a
> firewall can be good but you will need to spend more time researching
> and monitoring such a system than one of the cheap devices mentioned
> above.

This isn't really necessary. The main advantage of an external firewall
protecting one server is to limit what server can send out if it gets
compromised. Typically that isn't a huge risk, and if it is I wouldn't
trust some cheapo router that could be more vulnerable than the server
it is supposed to be protecting.

iptables can do a fine job of limiting what services are exposed to the
outside.