zonealarm

[Tom]

Since installing the latest update to the free version yesterday, I can't play any games. IE and Outlook access and all the other programs are fine.

It won't let my games connect. Any ideas?

 

[Testin da Cable]

mmmm....can you add them manually to the "good" list?

 

[Tom]

They're all added anyway, from the last version (it was an upgrade). It seems that only games are affected.

 

[Testin da Cable]

are they added in both outgoing and incoming filters? sorry, I'm not sure if you can manipulate those in ZA, but you have to have the games set to both be allowed to connect to the network and to allow connections from the network to the game's TCP or UDP socket.

in an aside...does software like gamebar / filesharing stuff work?

 

[Tom]

Everything else works, just the games are f00ked. Halo just goes mental for a few seconds while it tries to connect, Halflife stops when it tries to WON auth. No warning boxes from zonealarm or anything.

Their forum (zonealarm) is about as fast as a snail on Prozac, so thats useless. I'm looking on the newsgroups now.

 

[Testin da Cable]

well, perhaps their webserver is running with the upgrade too
can you reverse the process and go back to the last known good config?

 

[Tom]

God I hope so.

 

[FatBusinessman]

You could try deleting the games from your ZoneAlarm config and let it pop up the allow/deny dialog when they try to make a connection. See if that helps...

 

[xane]

Its probably blocking the higher UDP/TCP ports.

 

[Tom]

Originally posted by FatBusinessman
You could try deleting the games from your ZoneAlarm config and let it pop up the allow/deny dialog when they try to make a connection. See if that helps...

Tried that, it relists the games, but doesn't ask about permissions etc. Its like zonealarm sees a game, and freaks, thinking 'games = bad nonono" and just ignores them.

 

[Tom]

OK Zonealarm was being utterly stupid, and their support is shite, so I installed Agnitum Outpost Firewall, tested in via that grc.com website, and it seems very good.

More importantly, its allowing games, so the lesson is, DONT UPGRADE ZONEALARM PEOPLE.

 

[(Shovel)]

Outpost is an outstanding product. It has a few issues - sometimes detects exes as having changed when they haven't - MozillaFirebird.exe normally. However, the vast, vast majority of the time, excellent product

 

[Tom]

Yeah its a lot less user-friendly than ZA, but I'm configuring it to let programs that I trust do what they want. For instance, by default, it would only give 1 IE window internet access at any time, which was confusing, but I sorted that.

The thing I really hate about all firewalls is that sometimes important system requests prompt a response, and you don't quite know what to do with it.

 

[(Shovel)]

Yeah. Outpost is far more powerful than ZA, but it does fall at the expense of being "Idiot Proof" as ZA tries to be.

Once you get involved in the options a bit you tend to find (if you're at all familier) that the Rules configuaration is nicely exact, essentially a GUI for IPTables-like rules. I like that, gives a lot of power that you don't get from Windows otherwise.

The plug ins are pretty good too - DNS caching speeds up net access noticably.

 

[Ch3tan]

I've had this before Tom, only way I found out of it was to to upgrade over the top or re-install over the top and chose to not keep your old settings.

 

[Tom]

Originally posted by (Shovel)
Yeah. Outpost is far more powerful than ZA, but it does fall at the expense of being "Idiot Proof" as ZA tries to be.

Once you get involved in the options a bit you tend to find (if you're at all familier) that the Rules configuaration is nicely exact, essentially a GUI for IPTables-like rules. I like that, gives a lot of power that you don't get from Windows otherwise.

The plug ins are pretty good too - DNS caching speeds up net access noticably.

Shovel do you find that it slows browsing down? If I disable it and just use the XP firewall, its much faster at loading pages.

 

[(Shovel)]

I certainly haven't ever noticed if it does. Erm, as I say, from my experience DNS caching seemed to speed things up for me. It's hard to tell from where I am right now since the Internet access here is a bit shite.

Have you got other plug ins enabled? Things like the Ad-Blocking, Content and ActiveX security controls will almost certainly require a parse of everything that comes down, that could well be the cause of some speed issues. I run with just Attack Detection and DNS caching.

You can enable/disable plug ins from the Options -> Plug-Ins setup menu item

 

[xane]

I want to plug Norton Firewall here, I got it as a special offer when I was buying Norton AV, and I was very surpized as it is a good product, easy to use and comparible to ZoneAlarm. It has a combined anti-spam filter, ad-blocker, popup-blocker and parental security.

Unfortunately, Norton Internet Security, which is the AV and Firewall products together, is back up at $70, downloadable from the US website, but I'd still pay for it.

 

[Tom]

Its definitely slowing IE down shovel, try disabling yours and seeing if theres any difference in page loading speed. It only takes a few seconds to see. I tried disabling all that stuff, no difference I'm afraid.

 

[(Shovel)]

Hmmm, interesting... I must say, I do notice a difference. Certainly for me, it doesn't make significant enough impact for me to "care" as it were, pages are still loading amply quick enough.

If it does cause too much irritation, give Norton a look I don't know if they do a trial or not.