Installing and Configuring Network Components

There are many different network components and we are going to look at each of these. For the Security+ exam, we need to know which device can be used in different scenarios, so let's first look at firewalls that prevent unauthorized access and then the other devices.

Firewall

A firewall prevents unauthorized access to the corporate network, and in the Security+ exam, we tend to use a back-to-back configuration, as shown here:

Figure 7.1 – Back-to-back firewall configuration

You can see that each of these firewalls is not letting traffic pass through them; this is because we need to open only the ports that we need. If the firewall on the right is traversed, then the firewall on the left will hopefully prevent access to the internal network, known as the Local Area Network (LAN). To enable applications to pass through the firewall, we must open the port number for each application. Each application...