[NCSA-discuss] firewall for WinXP

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

I have a laptop running WinXP and was wondering how 
effective the built-in firewall is. Using nmap I find there 
are two modes of interest

o the netbios ports (137,139,445) are showing,

I assume this is for small home office duty, where you have 
a separate firewall to the internet and you need to swap 
files, print etc with other local computers.

o no ports showing at all

I assume this is for putting the machine directly on the 
internet. This is the way I run my linux machines and has 
worked for many years. However I have no idea whether you 
can extend the principle to windows.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks Joe


-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!