66: It Means Nothing

Here’s a chunk from the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators.

Through your career, people have repeatedly blamed “the firewall.” The word firewall dates from the 1980s, when the concept of network-level access control was both exotic and bizarre. In the last fifty years, access controls have become broader and more complex. Some controls remained in the devices arbitrarily labeled “firewalls,” while others migrated to routers and switches and other devices. What does the word “fi...