Firewall VS Router

For a small office of 10 clients then I would get a sonicwall firewall. ALthough called a firewall, it also includes NAT (which is what the database supplier probably meant when he said router).

Others would agree ot say get something along the lines of:

Checkpoint
Cisco PIX ($$$$$)
Watchguard
Linksys

So on and so on!!!

Hope this helps!!

Routers route traffic from network to network. YOu would get a router to route all of the traffic from your office to the Internet and visa versa.
Firewalls sit either behind or in front of routers (depends on your network setup; behind a router ismore common from what I have seen) and they examine the packets coming in. A firewall will keep unautorized users from connecting to internal machines. For example, you don't want a remote user to connect to TCP port 139 on your Windows machines; that is the NetBIOS port. If a remote user COULD get to this port on your servers, then they could break into your systems, get your data, deface your web sites, and cause all kinds of havoc. So, you put a firewall up that blocks inbound access to thisport.
Now, a firewall can do some packet re-routing. If you have a web server behind the firewall (with an internal IP of 10.1.1.2), but you have an external IP address of 4.15.1.8 that your www domain name resolves to, then the firewall could re-route TCP port 80 requests (the www port for browsing web sites) that come in on 4.15.1.8 and send the requests to 10.1.1.2. That way, eventhough your web server has a different IP address then the IP your domain name has, people could hit your web server.
But a router and a firewall are different things.

I agree with the suggestion of using SonicWall. I have used the SonicWall DMZ firewall, and it was very good for a small office. Go to www.sonicwall.com for details.
Cisco PIX is good also.

hope this helps

There's no such thing as too much security...a router and a firewall will be enough providing
customership won't evolve...like if two sets of hands wouldn't be usefull at times...but yes some
routers may be configured as such...and that makes for not so ligth contraptions and slow at that.

Answer 3 was great, it was not rejected. My Windows XP professional just did a script debug and than it crased. Great system, can't wait for the sp.

Thanks for all your helps!

Guess we have a great community here...

In essence having both a firewall and router would provide you with a 2-tier protection.

A firewall can also act as a routing device if all your clients & databases are directly connected to the firewall(eg. via a switch).

However, you should look @ a dedicated solution.

You mention the need for VPN and stateful inspection. This somehow indicates that you would like to have remote access.

A screening router could act as a first line of defence against external intruder (packet filtering), a firewall behind that will provide you with stateful inspection, and finally, if you could .. it'd be good to invest in an extra router between your firewall and internal users. This is to control the type of traffic going out ... and also to reduce the workload on your firewall.

If you want to build your own solutions... check out some of linux-built routers and firewalls!

They are likely to have all the functionality you're looking for... for almost free!