ProSafe Wireless-N 8-Port Gigabit VPN Firewall FVS318N

There is no need to use a fixed IP address on a computer. Because the IP address allocated by the DHCP server never changes, you do not need to assign a fixed IP address to a computer to ensure that it always has the same IP address.

A computer is identified by its MAC address—not its IP address. The network database uses the MAC address to identify each computer or device. Therefore, changing a computer’s IP address does not affect any restrictions applied to that computer.

Control over computers can be assigned to groups and individuals:

-You can assign computers to groups (see Manage the Network Database on this page) and apply restrictions (outbound rules and inbound rules) to each group (see Overview of Rules to Block or Allow Specific Kinds of Traffic on page 129).

-You can select groups that are allowed access to URLs that you have blocked for other groups, or the other way around, block access to URLs that you have allowed access to for groups (see Configure Content Filtering on page 178).

-If necessary, you can also create firewall rules to apply to a single computer (see Enable Source MAC Filtering on page 183). Because the MAC address is used to identify each computer, users cannot avoid these restrictions by changing their IP address.

Manage the Network Database

You can view the network database, manually add or remove database entries, and edit database entries.

To view the network database, select Network Configuration > LAN Setup > LAN Groups. The LAN Groups screen displays. (The following figure shows some manually added devices in the Known PCs and Devices table as an example.)

Figure 35.

LAN Configuration

68

Page 68
Image 68
NETGEAR FVS318N manual Manage the Network Database