network and firewall questions

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Andrew L. Gould" <algould at datawok.com> writes:

> Can someone access your computer by a port if nothing is listening to that 
> port?

Hopefully not.

> If not, then if you turn off services that you don't use and need to access 
> used services remotely (i.e. let them through a firewall), do you need a 
> firewall?

Assuming you *never* make mistakes and either accidentally enable a
service you didn't mean to, or misconfigure one of the services you're
supposed to be running, and also assuming none of the services you're
running intentionally has any bugs, then you're quite safe without a
firewall.  

Obviously, I recommend using a firewall, just to be sure.