Done a lot of research and it's all kind of confusing. Some switches are also firewalls, most firewalls seems to be routers, with or without their own switches, but they're all different depending on the manufacturer. Hence I now ask for advice here!
My problem:
I have two ports that give access to two subnets of public IPs.
What I want is to be able to connect servers to them and run ipfilter as a firewall, but some I would want to block traffic to depending on IP, before delivering packets to the machine that is.
Now, cisco layer 3 switches seems to have this functionality (ACL:s is what they call the firewall functionality right?). I have administered cisco ACL:s before through CLI on cisco pix (long time ago) so I guess it's about the same.
Would I be able to connect such a switch to my two subnet ports so that machines connected to the switch can all steal ip-adresses from any of the subnets?
The network units I don't want exposed directly to the WAN are all remote access controllers, known to be full of security holes. Perhaps it would be better to have a "dumb" switch and then a cheap router in front of these interfaces instead of an advanced switch with firewall functionality?
This is to be a small business network with 2-4 servers, possibly growing just a bit. Any other ideas than what I describe above are welcome!