Free firewall software

any recommendations

[limbo]

I am thinking of installing a firewall . I have looked at free ones - Zone alarm and Outpost - and wondered if anyone had experince with using these and could give me a few pointers/opinions

Ta

Limbo.

(posted in FOO as part of another thread but decided it was to far off topic so here it is again)

[mat]

Outpost has issues with XP and, to a lesser extent, Win2K - many people report BSOD's - I used the Pro version for a while, but have reverted to the (newest) version of ZA. It too had problems with XP, but they do seem to have been resolved.

ZA is probably the easiest and simplest for out-of-the-box usage, whereas Outpost has many plugins and is very extendable/customisable.

Others are Tiny personal firewall (Kerio?), Sygate and Norton, but I don't think any of these have free versions.

HTH

[Woz]

Tiny personal Firewall does still have a free version, you just have to hunt around for the Version 2 link on the download page.

Onya
Woz

[Receptional Andy]

>Tiny personal Firewall

As mentioned briefly above, Tiny's firewall is now Kerio (www.kerio.com) the Tiny one isn't supported anymore AFAIK so go for Kerio. It's freeware for personal use.

This and ZoneAlarm are the only firewalls that have been consistently effective right from the start. There's an interesting survey of personal firewalls at GRC.com if you're interested - slightly out of date but very useful.

[Bendy]

I've been usin ZA for about as long as I can remember and the only problems I've run into is when I take my computer gaming [with IP permissions] (so little relevance there regarding web design!)

Currently running ZA v3.1.395 on XP Home sp1 and no problems at all.

[limbo]

Thanks all

I have looked into all of what you have mentioned.

I think I might give ZA a whirl.

Cheers

[sun818]

Kerio Personal Firewall is another to look at. Small and lean build. Installs quick and bit more user friendly than ZoneAlarm, I think. For example, if you overwrite an EXE file, Kerio will ask you if its okay to execute. ZoneAlarm will just block the new EXE.

[bcolflesh]

I'll add another vote for Kerio Personal Firewall - IMHO it's far and away the best free solution...

Regards,
Brent

[mat]

ZoneAlarm will just block the new EXE.

... not been the case for some time - ZA will pop up a 'changed program' alert after an upgrade/patch or the like.

[bill]

Sygate does have a very functional free product that I've used on some of my machines as an alternative to ZA.

[sun818]

thanks Mat. As you can see, I haven't used a recent version of ZA ;)

[Receptional Andy]

>>ZoneAlarm will just block the new EXE.

Both ZA and Kerio use MD5 hashing to block replaced applications. AFAIK ZA was the first well known firewall to do this. Sygate etc had a number of vulnerabilities (including this one) that they only fixed relatively recently.

[ritch_b]

Sygate offer their Personal Firewall free of charge for non-commercial use - it's comprehensive but easy to both setup & use.

R.

[Meercat]

i'd recommend outpost, its got some nice features once you get used to it that arent in zone alarm pro, never tried some of the others

[akande]

use sysgate. Thats a free one I use to block my network admins from accessing my computer. It got so annoying after a while

[pendanticist]

Looks like outpost has a log file spammer from dialup-206.15.1.213.Dial1.SanFrancisco1.Level3.net working for them?

206.15.1.213 - - [29/Apr/2003:14:57:48 -0700] "GET blahblah.whatever HTTP/1.1" 200 2107 "Field blocked by Outpost (http*//www.agnitum.com)" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

Can you say: "Blocked by Pendanticist, boys and girls?"

When will they ever learn it's not polite to spam someones log files? <he asked rhetorically>

Th-a-a-wack!

Pendanticist.