[SOLVED] Setting up Winston Security

[Jeff1960]

Hello friends,

I have a few networking questions and I am not, I repeat, I a not a techie, yet.

I purchased Winston Privacy security box to help protect my home network. The only problem is, Winston won't connect directly to my AT&T UVerse modem/router directly. Then I was told to purchase a second router and connect Winston to the AT&T modem and then to the new router.

Ok, seems simple enough but.... Can I keep the same IP address and password on the second router or would I have to have 2 separate IP and passwords in my home? I also have (if I can use this instead of a second router) an Open Mesh A42 Access Point still in the box doing nothing.

Can anyone tell me if they setup Winston yet as it is new to the market?

I am sure I am missing something and for that I apologize but please feel free to ask any questions you have and hopefully I can answer them.

I have Windows 10 and I m running Bit-Defender software.

Best regards,

Jeff

 

[bill001g]

From the little I can tell about this box it installs similar to a vpn firewall. It must be placed between your network and the internet. When you have a modem/router combo device like you do you can not obviously place the box between the modem and router.

The best solution is to buy another router and run the ATT box as a modem only. BUT att are a bunch of jerks and they will not let you run a modem only, they force you to use their device.

So for most people you just turn off the wifi radios and pretend it is just a modem except of course you must be a little careful on the IP address you use on your lan so they are different than the wan.

When you add another box in between it makes it even more complex. Not sure how the box works if it needs ip addresses assigned then you just need to be careful the blocks are different.

In the end all your equipment will be on your lan ip on your new router. The security box will be on the wan/internet side of the new router you buy.

I would not get too excited about this box. It appears to use a tor like network which is fine for hiding traffic but I suspect it suffers from the same slowness tor does. Most the other features like the adblocking and content filters I suspect do not work very well. Almost all traffic is HTTPS encrypted. Even ad sites run https. The security box will only see encrypted traffic so it will be limited what it can do. From your traffics viewpoint this box is no different than a bad guy who could place a box in the path .

Many servers are using sites like akamai or google cloud visualization even ip addresses do not mean much.

 

[Jeff1960]

Thank you very much Bill for the support. I might just sell it to someone who can use it. I didn't know it was going to so complex. I just thought from the ad it was more of a plug and play device. When I reached out to the creators of Winston, they said they told everyone what was needed, but when I seen the ad on a local news channel, they didn't say anything of the sort. Oh well, buyer beware I guess.