Router Significance - documentation

[jnroche]

Hi Guys!Are there any ready made documentations for a router that states its importance, significance and has a blow by blow account of disadvantages(not so much of the disadvantage) and advantages online?Our boss is not satisfied having a router for his network when his IT personel (us) is convinced he needs to have a router setup. I can only know so much about routers and how important they are in a company with networked computers. But just for formality reasons and so we can have a full documentation, not just a couple of pages, to give to our boss and let him understand the risk of not having routers.I was having a hard time compiling resources over the net at such a limited amount of time.please help.thanks

[aspnetguy]

I router has a hardware firewall which IMO is better than a software firewall. It helps you control which ports are open and who can access them. It also let's you share your connection or setup wireless connections.There really is no reason not to have one, unless of course you enjoy picking up the pieces each time your computer gets hacked or gets viruses.

[justsomeguy]

I'm confused, if he wants to get rid of a router, what does he plan to replace it with? You need something with routing capabilities, whether it is a basic router, or a firewall router, or a VPN router or whatever. The alternative to not having a router is to have your ISP come in to a switch, and have all the workstations plug into that switch (a switch, BTW, is sort of like a router, but without the routing capability). That would require that you get a separate IP address for each device on the network from the ISP, and each device (all servers, workstations, printers, etc) will each have to be configured with a unique static IP. The switch would not provide any security benefits like NAT, so each computer will also need to have a software firewall and virus scanner installed on it.The point of a router is that it will plug into your ISP's incoming connection, and provide a DHCP server to allow all of the other machines on the network that are connected to it to access the internet through a shared IP address. That way you can run your business off 1 or 2 IPs instead of needing 20 unique IPs if you have 20 machines on the network. The router will also provide at a minimum NAT routing to block unwanted traffic, and more higher end routers will provide an additional firewall capability. What I described above really isn't an alternative to not having a router, really the only alternative is that you set up a server on your network to act as a router and install a DHCP server to hand out IPs to everything else. So, you can either go through the hassle of installing and configuring a server router with firewall and DHCP, or you can buy a router for 100 bucks and be done with it.A router is also really the only way to get wireless access. You could set up a wireless access point that would plug into a switch, but it wouldn't be very usable if you didn't have a DHCP server on the network to assign IPs to the clients. Routers are designed specifically to distribute an incoming internet connection securely to multiple computers on the local network side.If your boss is telling you he wants to dump the router, then I suggest you do a little research on something like pricewatch.com and price out what it would cost to build, setup and install a server to do routing and DHCP, or also a switch plus the added cost of a block of static IPs from your ISP. I'll tell you right now that the standalone router will be cheaper by at least an order of magnitude. You can't just dump the router, you need to replace it with something to do the same job. Surely your boss doesn't think that the router just sits on the network not doing anything?

[aspnetguy]

or perhaps research other local companies were you can get a job, prefereabley a company run by people who are not idiots!

[jlhaslip]

or perhaps research other local companies were you can get a job, prefereabley a company run by people who are not idiots!

And when you find that place, post the address here...

[aspnetguy]

lol I actually work for a great company in Nova Scotia (that's in Canada). I am the lead programmer (only 1 other part timer programmer ). The companies main focus for the last 13 years has been infrastructure (networks, cctv, telephone systems,etc) but in the last 2+ years they (I) have been developing software for internal use and also a CMS for building websites.I was luck to find such a good company to work for...there are not too many people in this area that provide "good" IT services.

[jnroche]

lol I actually work for a great company in Nova Scotia (that's in Canada). I am the lead programmer (only 1 other part timer programmer ). The companies main focus for the last 13 years has been infrastructure (networks, cctv, telephone systems,etc) but in the last 2+ years they (I) have been developing software for internal use and also a CMS for building websites.I was luck to find such a good company to work for...there are not too many people in this area that provide "good" IT services.

Ill try to exhaust first all my efforts to at least help this company better their security in terms of IT infrastructure. but i need some help with my documentation and our proposal, before hunting for other companies that are not run by @$*&! lolsawkward this is the only company i know that does not have a routing capability. The number of computers are increasing by each month... :)thanks for the englightenment guys! never expected 4 people would reply to this .. lolsgod bless!PS would you know other softwares online that offer a sort of like a hack-scan to PCs?? im thinking if that software can tell how vulnerable our network is then i guess that would become enough for our boss to convince a router with firewall capability....lols!!! i tried the symantec thing but it basically just passed! lols

[aspnetguy]

run a shields up test from one of their computers and it will tell you what ports are open and vunerable to attack.https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

[boen_robot]

Everytime someone mentiones the word "router" I reply with this, and I won't make an exception again:MikroTik make the best routing software there is. I use it at work to manage about 60 people and I've never thought a router can do all the things RouterOS (MikroTik's main product) can do, all at once. DHCP and NAT are practically trivial with it. There's also HotSpot (internet after a user name and password), MAC protection, DHCP on SSID (give a certain IP to a certain mainboard), Wireless client (get your internet from another wireless router)...The two killer features are a Windows application to control it (terminal and HTTP (with limited capabilities) conrtrol available too), and that RouterOS can run on any PC. For the above 60 people, I have 400Mhz Pentium, 128MB SD RAM (or was it 64MB? Anyhow...), 2GB HDD and an on board video. The CPU is at 20% when everyone is online, and 10% when not everyone is there. The HDD has plenty of free space. There was one time I raised the CPU up to 60% when I was making a network benchmark, sending 24 concurent connections, and about 1000 packets in 10 seconds. That's the highest the router has ever went.There is one way with which your boss can use one internet over several machines without a router. By placing a second network card in one PC and using that computer as a router while still using Windows on it. One network card will receive the internet and the other will be connected to an internal switch that will share the internet with the rest. However, there are no routing capabilities with this approach. You can't stop people individually, you can't limit them (or give someone more), you can't possibly transfer outside requests to an internal machine and so on. Using something like RouterOS would be A LOT better.P.S. RouterOS' manual is very complete. If you learn all THAT, you'll know enough about networks to call yourself "expert".

[justsomeguy]

There is one way with which your boss can use one internet over several machines without a router.

I just want to point out that the network still has a router, it's just not a router-in-a-box, it's a server setup to act as a router.