best firewall?

[BobViper]

ALOHA
Of course ANY FireWall is bypassable~especially if you let down your guard and invite a trojan program INTO YOUR SYSTEM!!
The Idea WILL Always be to build layers of Defense(FireWalls~Multiple IS best) and layers of Protective procedures(AntiVirus Scans)File Encryption(BestCrypt the Best)and make your system NOT Worth the TROUBLE for someone to mess with and Hack someone elses machine !!!
ALOHA

[henry]

Heard that there might be conflicts when running multiple firewalls on 1 system.

So just beware before thinking that...
"hey, if firewall A has flaw X, while firewall B could cover flaw X and yet has flaw Y which firewall A covers, I should be running both firewall A & B"

[dysangel]

I've used Mcafee, Norton, and Zonealarm, not all at the same time! And the only time I've been hacked, I was using Norton and my system asked me if I wanted to wait for the other user to sign off before shutting down. I was running DSL at the time. If I want to reduce the chance of being hacked, should I look into using a different browser? Doesn't that play a part in it? I currently use IE5.5.

[PacoBell]

Originally posted by henry
Heard that there might be conflicts when running multiple firewalls on 1 system.

So just beware before thinking that...
"hey, if firewall A has flaw X, while firewall B could cover flaw X and yet has flaw Y which firewall A covers, I should be running both firewall A & B"

Umm...so run multiple firewalls on multiple systems in a serial fashion. Tada! Problem solved

[leebolan]

Sometimes with 2 firewalls you make it where you cant get on line at all. It blocks everything or nothing. That is in most cases . So that is why they say not to.

[Todddster]

Hey,

www.sygate.com

Free personal firewall. Seems to work better with my system than ZoneAlarm (which I paid for).

todddster

[BobViper]

Aloha
My Best setup was BlackIce+Norton Security Suite2001+Zone Alarm~Yes at the same time Interesting to watch how EACH had its own tracking abilities AND how you could track the walls themselves...
BlackIce usually only activates under Direct Attack and Blocks the attack~ZoneAlarm popsup for lots of things,many innocent server requests from sites you left still trying to reach you~Blackd had to ask Zone Alarm permission to access the internet~COOL~Norton has a LOT of playful features and it helped me to keep an eye on ZoneAlarm to see when it was talking to its Home Server,Lots of fun and learned a LOT!
I DO listen to "WHAT THEY SAY" then I just makeup My own MINDTry it a different way! Sometimes THEY are Right~BUT~I found that many times THEY are just limited by what THEY were TOLD they couldn't do!!!!!!
ALOHA Bob

[Inanis]

Why dont you use what your nick name implies, and use a really cheap 486 running linux and ipchains/ipfw?

[vibe666]

All this talking about how ZoneAlarm doesn't work with XP but Tiny does. Did anyone read their user manual that comes with XP? Or even take a look around your network settings?

XP has it's own firewall (along with a load of other inbuilt stuff to kill the competition). Has anyone even tried it?

I tested my old Win98se install with TinyFirewall at www.dslreports.com (it passed with flying colours on all the free scans).

Then I did te same tests with XP Pro's Inbuilt firewall and it came up smelling just as sweet as tiny.

Anyone looking to enable their XP firewall just need sto go to their network connection properties and it's in there under advanced, just make sure any ports you aren't using are disabled under settings first as occasionally they can be left open.

Let me know if anyone has any different results with the XP firewall, i'm very interested to hear other opinions.

***viBe***

[earnie86]

XP's firewall is excellent with inbound traffic, but does absolutely nothing to stop outbound traffic. The other firewalls attempt to stop a lot of outbound traffic as well. Although they should be used with a good real time scanner like pccillin. Go to www.grc.com and try leaktest on xp's firewall, and try tooleaky also.

[mcooper]

I actually cannot believe noone suggested a Linksys firewall or the like. First of all, it is beautiful no matter how many computers you have internally. But second, if you have two or more (up to whatever the max is), it just cannot be beat.
In the old day, I tried dozens of firewall/connection sharing utilities on Win9x/2k boxes until I stopped using M$. Then I switched to ipchains/netfilter on Linux. Then I just got plain tired of keeping my "server" computer up all the time and tried a couple floppydisk variants of Linux firewalls such as gnat. Still, I got tired of the space and noise associated with a dedicated box for firewalling and forked over the dough for a Linksys 1+4 cable/dsl router. It is highly configurable and **** convenient for snapping any number of machines on the network through the simple use of DHCP, patch cords and uplink ports. It has a web interface for configuration and features syslog reporting, port filtering and forwarding among other things. Where is that in ZoneAlarm? For home use and even small business use, the Linksys or comparable Cable/DSL router cannot be beat.
For all you Micro$~1 junkies, I've used and junked Norton, Sybergen, BlackIce, Wingate, and others. It took me one look at ZoneAlarm to say heck no. I haven't found a Windows solution I'd recommend. Not to mention Arrogance XP's builtin "security."

cheers

[Tekkitan]

betas out ALL other firewalls? ummmm no. hardware firewalls own

[mcooper]

I see. I guess I should have specified that Linksys makes hardware, not software. Hence, it is a hardware firewall.
http://linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid=20&grid=23
Gnatbox www.gnatbox.com also makes hardware firewalls, which I did compare it to. Before we get too deep, yes, I can compare it to Checkpoint Firewall-1 also, as I am the firewall admin for quite a large corp. (Not that I'm saying Firewall-1 is an inferior solution for a large user base.)
Anyways, I'd love to hear opinions as to which hardware or software solutions might beat it or its competitors such as D-Link and Netgear...

[Qvark]

Sygates personal firewall rocks - period.

It works perfect under XP. I have had nothing but trouble using Zonealarm.

[earnie86]

Which version of sygate personal firewall are you using? On my pc with XP, I can't even get into windows without bsod. I like it also, my son has it on his pc, but I can't even try it on my pc.