Can I use a switch and a firewall both at layer 2 of the network setup instead of chaining them?

Question

By chaining i mean T1 router>Firewall>Switch>others

I want to be able to have the t1 router and firewall connect directly to the switch but I really don't know how to come about getting the clients to request everything through the firewall and then make the firewall hop to the t1 router.

Answer 1

This will only really work if you are using a layer 3 switch and you'll still need to have two network cards in your firewall.

Typically, firewalls will have a clean and dirty interface, so you'd VLAN off your switch to be dirty and clean. The firewall could then connect to both sides.

Users would have default gateway of the switch's private IP address. Traffic would then be forwarded onto the firewall, which would apply its rule set and forward on the dirty switch VLAN and then onto the router.

Answer 2

T1 router>Firewall>Switch>others is the only correct configuration.

Why would you possibly want to do it any other way??