Who said anything about it being standard? I said I know this CAN happen, and I said it was quite some time ago. We can only hope this insanity isn’t still in practice anywhere, but I learned long ago that expecting a corporation to NOT do foolish things will give me the same disappointing results as expecting money to come out of my ass. If there’s a manager involved, then something on the tech side is going to get fucked up in the name of saving a buck. Therefore I cannot just assume OP gets a normal NAT address, nor can I assume they have any other firewall type device between them and the internet. With limited data, the best I can do is try and provide some general information, hopefully encourage them to ask more questions or provide more specific information, and just hope they don’t have a ridiculously stupid ISP that makes things needlessly complicated.

Most of my experience is with iptables, but yeah, I think until you start adding rules nothing is implicitly denied? Once you enable a couple of initial rules then you should have good blocking from the outside while allowing internal traffic to connect freely. It doesn’t get in your way until you start using it, but then it doesn’t take much to get it going.

When you say old gear is not cheaper… I take it you’re looking for some pretty modern stuff? When I decided to get more involved in photography I picked up a Canon Ti4 used from ebay. It was about 6 years old at the time and I picked up a good one for around $250. The same thing with lenses, everything I have is from ebay and everything was relatively cheap (although I’d love to get one of those Sigma 600mm lenses, but oof!). Yeah my body is closer to 12 years old now but I still use it all the time and it’s done well for me, plus the EF mounts are common as hell, and all of my lenses have image stabilization built in.

If you’re having trouble getting trash photos, maybe check back with this group on what lenses match the shots you’re trying to take? There’s definitely some garbage lenses out there, and early-on I discovered Canon’s own 300mm EF lens have two different models that look identical, but there’s a huge difference in the quality between them (which is why the good one costs twice as much, even used).

One good thing about Canon is that you have Magick Lantern available. Most of us can’t afford the functionality that this software provides for free! If you want to stick with Canon and get the best bang for your buck, check to see which bodies ML is compatible with to narrow down your selections. After that I would check the lens mounts to see what other mounts can be adapted to fit a body to give you the widest selection of lenses possible. This is usually a one-way street due to focal length so it might pay to choose a body with greater adaptability.

You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense. And it didn’t make any sense at the time either. After setting up the router with a laptop, I moved the connection to the firewall but it refused to connect. When I finally got ahold of tech support they said the connection locks into the first machine that logs in and they had to release it so I could connect the new machine. And just like that the firewall was given a routable IP address and connected to the internet. Stupidest thing I ever heard of, but that’s how they were set up. Now this was around 15+ years ago and I would certainly hope nobody is doing that crap today, but apparently that was their brilliant method of limiting how many devices could get online at once.

I’ll have to check it out, thanks for the link! [Edit] oh it’s a book, not an online article.

Yeah this article is really long, and a lot of it is over my head (especially the math), but they have brought up several interesting points and provided a much easier-to-understand model of the holographic universe. I mentioned this theory in another post here a few months ago and was basically shut down with claims that this wasn’t even possible and the theory had been long-discounted, and yet here we are with modern work still plugging away at the concept. It makes me appreciate just how much hell all scientists go through when they posit theories that contradict other people’s personal beliefs.

What are you talking about? You’re assuming that every residential router is going to have some kind of firewall enabled by default (they don’t). Sure, if OP has a router that provides a basic firewall type service then it will likely block all incoming unauthorized traffic. However OP is specifically talking about a linux-based firewall and hasn’t specified if they have a router-based firewall service in place as well so we can only provide info on the firewall they specified. And if you look at UFW, the default configuration is to allow outgoing traffic and block all but a very few defined incoming ports.

You’re also making the assumption that OP is using NAT, when that is not always the case for all ISPs. Some are really annoying with their setup in that they give a routable IP to the first computer that connects and don’t allow any other connections (I had that setup once with Comcast). In this case, you wouldn’t even need to define port-forwarding to get directly to OP’s computer – and any services they might be running. This particular scenario is especially dangerous for home computers and I really hope no legitimate ISP is still following a practice like this, however I don’t take anything for granted.

Regardless of what other equipment OP has, UFW is going to provide FAR better defaults and configurability when compared to a residential router that is simply set up to create the fewest support calls to their ISP.

Possibly? The way I read it, it sounded like OP wasn’t really even sure what a firewall does.

Sure it CAN be configured, but the typical policy of firewalls is to start from a position of blocking everything. From what I’ve seen, on Linux the standard starting point is blocking all incoming and allowing all outgoing. On Windows the default seems to be blocking everything in both directions. Sure you could start with a policy of allowing everything and block only selected ports, but what good is that when you can’t predict what ports an attacker might come from?

You’ve got it backwards. A firewall blocks everything, then you open up the ports you want to use. A standard config would allow everything going out, and block everything coming in (unless you initiated that connection, then it is allowed).

So the question you should be asking, is what services do you think you’re going to be running on your desktop that you plan to allow anyone on the internet to get to?

I’ve also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren’t able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn’t replace because of manufacturer lockouts.