Hardware Firewalls Hardware firewalls are normally reviewed as corporate or small office equipment. Price is a big factor in that the corporate firewalls use more technology than the small office equipment. Remember that any home user with a broadband connection and more than one computer connected to each other and the Internet is equivalent to a small office. Most hardware firewall technology is also incorporated into the routers used to connect networks to the outside world. These devices contain capability to act as switches or hubs as well.
Some devices also contain additional ports that act as hub ports for the internal network.
Most of these devices are easy to setup and contain a Windows GUI or Web server to guide that setup. The DHCP client utility also is used to accept the ISP IP address from the broadband supplier. The NAT utility is the basic line of defense against attacks. NAT translates the internal IP addresses to the public address as the outbound traffic controller and back to the internal IP addresses for the inbound traffic. This is important to have in the firewall.