Firewall

Neo · Post by **Neo** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 5:32 pm

Hey, what's a good software firewall for Windows?

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 6:36 pm

ZoneAlarm

Neo · Post by **Neo** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 7:50 pm

heh! That's what I used to use. But I was told it wasn't good. But that's only because I didn't have a hardware firewall, and the node that is assigned my WAN IP address isn't located in my home. ^_~ So people can scan the ports on my WAN IP all they want to, and it'll look like I'm not well protected. ^_~

Well, thanks. ^_^

Top Wop · Post by **Top Wop** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 8:29 pm

ZoneAlarm is inferior to Kerio Personal Firewall but thats my opinion based on experience. Its been a while since I used the former and all I remember was being fed up with it.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 8:29 pm

http://www.kerio.com/kpf_home.html

Kerio > all other software firewalls

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 8:37 pm

SPI NAT router between you and the net > any software firewall. IMHO tho

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 9:25 pm

Nah I think even the software firewall manufacturers will admit that a hardware firewall is better, if for no other reason than it takes the load off of your CPU.

If you have a spare box with 2 NIC cards you can set up Linux relatively easily to act as a gateway/firewall. I was able to set up Slackware 9 on a P3-500 with 256 MB of RAM to be a firewall in about half an hour. There are far more user-friendly task-specific distros out there that'll have you up and running in minutes.

suicide eddie · Post by **suicide eddie** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 3:31 am

everyone has thier loves and and hates with firewalls, if your going to use one on a pc that is being used for web browsing get one that scans page scripts. using symantec 2005 myself (at-guard engine)and the only fault i can find with it is that you cant copy/paste from the log to the rulesets. another good one if you like to make your rulesets from scratch is visnetic (black ice)but has limited options for script scanning

Neo · Post by **Neo** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 10:24 pm

Yeah, I already have a NAT router. The reason I asked was because I want to prevent malware from accessing the Internet.

Ferno · Post by **Ferno** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:42 pm

kerio is great to run on your box if you only have one box to use.

If you have a second, use m0n0wall. http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/

best part of all is it requires no HDD. yup, boots off the cd and is up and running faster than a fresh 98 install.