>>>>>McAfee AntiVirus Plus is scanning the network to verify for suggested licensing. This is particular irritating when traveling. Earlier on this week, it told me about the entire network neighborhood of the company. Then, it is at the hotel. Anyone would know how to turn that off?
>>>>
>>>>Uninstall it and use MSE instead.
>>>>
>>>>You might consider bringing along and using a hardware firewall when you travel. Hotels are notorious for hacking, if they're not set up to isolate guest users from one another. As a byproduct this would also fix your problem with McAfee, as there would be no other hosts on your local subnet.
>>>
>>>HW firewall I had not thought about, but usually I try to find hotels offering cabled LAN as well and then I have a tiny router giving me a separate NAT/subnet...
>>
>>That's what I meant.
>
>my mental picture was you going into a ski or scuba resort carying someting like
>
>http://shop.jacob-computer.de/cisco-asa-5505-firewall-edition-bundle-asa5505-ul-bun-k9-artnr-134853.html?gclid=CJXb75SX9r0CFQoYwwodv4UAkQ
>or
>http://www.allfirewalls.de/Hersteller/Securepoint/UTM-Serie/RC-700/
>
>but more tilted to the second link... But I had not realized that HW FW had moved into price range and form factors like
>https://www.distrelec.de/ishopWebFront/search/luceneSearch.do?dispatch=find&keywordPhrase=848563&language=de&withTax=yes&utm_source=GoogleShopDE_02&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=GoogleShopDE_02_848563&gclid=CM3lyYmU9r0CFWTlwgodBV0AQw
>
>while I still prefer my pure cigarette box formfactor router without dedicated FW ROM, but with 2 LAN ports and WLAN with a HW switch for travelling, it might be prudent to add another step here at cable snake home....
>
>Still, one of the issues we had this year was some HW FW filtering out part of an update which included something the FW thought of as viral - which makes your musings about McAffee growing into ROM more disturbing ;-)

I think the idea at a hotel, resort etc. is just to avoid being low-hanging fruit. In that case any consumer router/NAT firewall is probably "good enough". Unless you're a high-value target, or have reason to believe someone is out to get you. ISTR you had a serious run-in some time ago, wouldn't blame you for being wary.

I have a client using a couple of those NetGear firewall/routers. They're under very light use and seem reliable. They don't get hammered with serious hack or DoS attempts so I don't know how well they would respond. The one thing I don't like about that model is the VPN support. It requires specialized VPN client software, you can't connect with the built-in Windows VPN client. IIRC the client software costs $ per seat, too, it's not free: http://www.netgear.com/business/products/security/vpn-software.aspx#tab-overview

For very small businesses I've had good success running dd-WRT on Linksys WRT-54GL. I've just started using Asus RT-N66U instead, currently with stock firmware but that device has good 3rd-party firmware support. There are 802.11ac versions of that router but ac is currently draft only, with not a lot of client support yet so the N66U seems a decent choice for now.

There was a recent SlashDot discussion http://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/04/17/2018234/ask-slashdot-which-router-firmware-for-bandwidth-management . Some of the comments recommended Mikrotik devices e.g. http://www.ncix.com/detail/routerboard-rb2011uias-2hnd-in-5xlan-5xgblan-poe-a0-94260.htm . Apparently not for beginners but looks like an interesting option.