hahahaha that's a good one...

Not having a firewall at all is dangerous. Dialup or not. In my firewall logs I can see many packets send to my blocked ports. From different ips. I think it's just scanning a range of addresses. Dialup won't help there.

ha ha ha ha, well I guess I should be BASHED with at least a # of CHROOT then. Sorry I have been installing LFS all day. Oh and, sorry about the bad info. I always thought it didn't matter if you had dial up because you are constantly changing IP's and are on and off the net so quickly that it would very hard to attack you.

I guess I was wrong (again).

lol... it seems it's not too far off from football... all you need is one chance... just that one chance at goal. that would be enough. it's hard to always play the keeper...

I remember not a long time ago when I wasn't concerned about firewalls and I just got my DSL line up and running I used to leave the machine on the whole night downloading warez games, and at one point my ISP gave me a cortesy phone call: " ... We believed your machine was acting as one of the points to attack our servers on [don't remember the date, about two years ago], we believe that you weren't aware of such delibarate act, and you were just a victim as we were... Please, if you don't use a firewall don't let others to take an advantage of the potentials of your machine to do hurm to other systems on the internet, don't let it download unattendent." Lucky me it wasn't ebay or yahoo to call me. So from that moment I gave the security of the net a second thought.