I work at a food service place and recently started talking to the owner about his networks and things. He has “hired” me on as his IT guy. so my boss does not let me think for my self because I am still in school so he just tells me what is going to happen and makes me do the work.
recently we got credit card machines installed and they ran smoothly for the first two months, but now they start to time out due to being able to communicate with the cc processor fast enough. when I told the boss this he told me that at his other store that he just plugs his cc machine directly into the modem.
I am here to ask this is it safe to plug cc machine, cameras, and then our firewall directly into the cable modem.
If you plug the CC machine and cameras directly into the modem, the firewall is no longer protecting them. If there are any open ports on these machines (for debugging or the like), they could be remotely exploited over the internet. This advice may not apply if the modem contains router/firewall functions.
Also, depending on the configuration of the network access, this might only work with one or a small number of machines - usually business internet only gives you a small # of public IP’s addresses. You should figure out what actual services are provided by the business internet and modem.
By separating the CC machines onto a separate VLAN as Tom suggests, you keep the that privileged network traffic away from the other general traffic. You could also set up some QOS on the firewall/router to prioritize traffic from that VLAN. In an ideal world that would help with time-outs. In practice, I have no experience with CC machines, so take this advice with a grain of salt.