Security Suggestion. Will this work?

[Tdawg]

My friend and I were talking about cable modem security, as both of us recently subscribed to @Home. Both of us also happen to have home networks so we wanted to be able to share file & printer resources between machines on our networks. After much discussion we came up with the following solution and wondered if this would work:

Disable the "File and Print Sharing" bindiing for the TCP/IP protocol in Windows 9x, but leave it enabled for IPX/SPX. This would deter hackers from getting in through the TCP/IP stack while still enabling sharing between machines.

Any thoughts or suggestions. Talking with the guys at work about this, some commented that mixing TCP/IP and IPX/SPX protocols will degrade performance; I can accept that since I still play some games that are IPX/SPX only.

[dynhost]

What you mentioned will work fine. Cable modem is just a "router" that only routes IP packets it won't route IPX or NetBIOS at all so no one can see your IPX shared files accept for computers within your LAN.

However to be on the safe side, I would always put a password on every share mount point. I use separate "Read Only" and "Full Access" passwords. Windows 95/98 can remember your password and reconnecting to the share at start up, so you won't have to enter them every time you connect. I also share a certain directory, not C:\. For example, I share C:\my-share-files\ and then I will put files that I want to share there.

Remember, there are two ways to secure your system: one is to unplug the network cable, two is to be sure that the contents of you disk have no valuable data, don't put stuffs like your bank account numbers, credit card numbers etc. on any disk that you share!

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Static Host Name for Dynamic IP address: http://www.dynhost.com

[slacker]

You could also just use NetBEUI (non-routable protocol) for your LAN-based file sharing.

NetBEUI is even faster than IPX/SPX and NWLink... =)