The bi-monthly firewall thread

[(Shovel)]

I did a search through old Free Personal Firewall threads but things seem to have moved on a little since then.

ZoneAlarm 3 is irritating me. It's really not very good to use. So I want to change.

Yesterday I tried Outpost which is incredibly detailed - has a powerful rules creator - but despite my best efforts refuses to allow anything onto the net! (Taking care to allow for the Uni proxu didn't help either).

Now, Tiny PF is nolonger free, the last free version appears to be version 2 and they have progressed to version 4.

I've resintalled ZA 2.6 now - but I don't know if this is a good idea since it presumably isn't up to date to deal with newer trojan/hacker techniques.

Trojans are no worry though since Norton 2002 is always kept updated.

What are you, the wider world, using at the moment? And what would you recommend?

Thank you,

 

[Will]

I'm using a product I find very nice to use, called...Zonealarm 3.

Actually, I find it a bit nicer than ZA 2. People are funny like that, aren't they?

 

[xane]

You can still use TPF 2, it works fine as a simple outgoing traffic blocker, but for intrusion detection you need something else.

My own solution is a separate dedicated router/firewall machine, made from my older PC parts and running IPCop, which is based on a severely cut down Linux distro, and then run TPF on the individual machines in the network.

 

[GDW]

Firewalls are for wimps..nuff!

 

[~YuckFou~]

Originally posted by Grandadwrinkle
Firewalls are for wimps..nuff!

Due to your lack of firewall I now have the images of you and those goats. Money will prevent me from distributing them. Don't bother using your bank account or credit cards to pay me, I've already maxed those out

 

[Will]

Yuck has a very good point. Firewalls are needed. Let any of the white hats in the house have a play with your IP address and you'll see what I mean.

 

[(Shovel)]

Though it wasn't mentioned directly (you mentioned TPF2 rather than ZA2) so I assume that ZA2 isn't going to protect incoming as securely?

I mean, we are on the academic network so UMIST will have a proper firewall in place - though I don't if that protects me from "teh Studentzz".

I really liked the thorough rules in Outpost, it just didn't seem to work properly. Don't suppose anyone else has overcome problems with it?