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Definitive Best Firewall

Asked by Si,

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Definitive Best Firewall  

527 members have voted

  1. 1. Your choice?

    • Hardware Firewall/NAT router
      131
    • Jetico
      2
    • Kerio
      43
    • McAfee
      9
    • Norton
      11
    • Outpost
      52
    • Sygate
      53
    • Windows Firewall
      52
    • ZoneAlarm
      116
    • N/A
      58

  2. 2. Your choice?

    • Ommiquad
      2
    • Netveda Safety.NET
      1
    • BlackIce
      18
    • Linux based firewall distro
      32
    • Microsoft ISA
      24
    • Tiny
      9
    • BitDefender
      20
    • Lavasoft
      33
    • Other (please specify below)
      35
    • N/A
      353

  3. 3. Your choice?

    • Look 'n' Stop
      71
    • N/A
      452

Question

110 answers to this question

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Mentor

Saadu

Posted
Posted

ZA must die. Im never ever ever putting that **** on my system again. They were good until their core business remained firewall. Ever since they ventured into things like av monitoring, spy ware checks, privacy protection, the package has just become too bloated. My system now takes a good two minutes to boot. What i need is a simple software to monitor incoming and outgoing traffic that i can control myself.

I warn you all, even through the poll is tilted towards ZA, their software has issues. I did installed the latest ZA after a clean install of XP with nothing but drivers and new updates from windows. Still it takes longer to boot. Remove ZA windows boots much much faster!!! Browsing their support forum only gives issues like clean your temp files, remove start up programs, WHAT TEMP FILES? this happens on new install!! what start up programs? i ain't got any except drivers and windows services. What ****es me off is they know that there is something wrong with the programs and it has been plaguing them since a year now which they refuse to solve. I even disabled the things in ZA that i dont need, thanks my AV does a good job of keeping upto date, i dont wnat u monitoring that, i dont use outlook and crap to download malware so i dont need u sniffing for that or checking downloads, just do a simple job of blocking incoming traffic and monitoring outgoing and let me have control over what u block and allow. thats all. ZoneAlarm, you're on my no-go list. Im going GPL for FW if i need to but i will avoid you like plague.

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Collaborator

Tech Freak

Posted
Posted

For all those who said "I prefer hardware firewalls so that I don't have a software one eating up resources on my PC" (and the like), keep this mind:

Ask any network security professional, and they will tell you (and prove to you) that you need BOTH a hardware firewall for the perimetre AS WELL AS software firewalls on each and any machines in the network.

Dig up ordinary network security literature and you will understand why. ALWAYS use both hardware and software firewalls for peripheral and internal security respectively!

As for antivirus progs, they are a totally different story and one should NOT think that a firewall or antivirus is enough on its own. Again, use BOTH.

ZA must die. Im never ever ever putting that **** on my system again. They were good until their core business remained firewall. Ever since they ventured into things like av monitoring, spy ware checks, privacy protection, the package has just become too bloated. My system now takes a good two minutes to boot. What i need is a simple software to monitor incoming and outgoing traffic that i can control myself.

I warn you all, even through the poll is tilted towards ZA, their software has issues. I did installed the latest ZA after a clean install of XP with nothing but drivers and new updates from windows. Still it takes longer to boot. Remove ZA windows boots much much faster!!! Browsing their support forum only gives issues like clean your temp files, remove start up programs, WHAT TEMP FILES? this happens on new install!! what start up programs? i ain't got any except drivers and windows services. What ****es me off is they know that there is something wrong with the programs and it has been plaguing them since a year now which they refuse to solve. I even disabled the things in ZA that i dont need, thanks my AV does a good job of keeping upto date, i dont wnat u monitoring that, i dont use outlook and crap to download malware so i dont need u sniffing for that or checking downloads, just do a simple job of blocking incoming traffic and monitoring outgoing and let me have control over what u block and allow. thats all. ZoneAlarm, you're on my no-go list. Im going GPL for FW if i need to but i will avoid you like plague.

I will have to agree to what Saadu said. ZA started as a near perfect firewall, and it ended up a bunch of bloatware c**p.

I'm also in search of a robust, SAFE, lightweight firewall....

Hardware firewall

IPCop for home / smal office, SonicWALL for small office - medium/large office, Cisco for large corporate installs

I've done a few SonicWall deployments for people and they work extremely well. Armed with content filtering, realtime antivirus scanning at packet level, IDS/IPS, fragmentation filters etc etc it's a VERY good guard at the network's entry point.

Higher models do get a bit pricey with subscriptions though...

  • 0
Grand Master

Toology

Posted
Posted
I will have to agree to what Saadu said. ZA started as a near perfect firewall, and it ended up a bunch of bloatware c**p.

I'm also in search of a robust, SAFE, lightweight firewall....

I consider Outpost to be safe and lightweight. It comes bundled with 4 or so plugins (i.e: anti-spyware, ad-block etc.) that I find useless and can easily be disabled or removed entirely. The only plugin I leave installed and enabled is called Attack Detection. I take advantage that you can set it to run as a background process and all of that amounts to ~7 MB of memory usage. Since I set mine to run according to predefined rules the only time Outpost asks anything of me is when a program component has changed and is asking permission to access the network.
  • 0
Collaborator

Tech Freak

Posted
Posted

Toology, thanks for your reply. I will check Outpost and let you know.

Also, for everyone in this thread, I've installed and trial-ing Kaspersky Internet Secuirty 6.0 and it's quite nice. It seems to be doing the job correctly, I've been to a few dodgy websites and it blocked popups and killed online "trojans", I even tested some firewall rules, anti-spam, e-mail scanning etc. It has nice integration with Outlook and it will let you "preview" e-mails as they are downloaded (show only the headers), and once you approve all/some of the e-mails you want, it will THEN let Outlook download the body.

The firewall is quite flexible, albeit I couldn't get it to block the simplest of things: ping.exe. I tried many rules and none of them seemed to block it for some odd reason.

  • 0
Grand Master

Toology

Posted
Posted

I now recommend people use Comodo instead of Outpost. The new version of Outpost is extremely disappointing in terms of performance. It bogged down my system at startup by bloating another system process and sending CPU usage up to 97%. I thought none of it at first because I thought it would gradually deflate in terms of memory usage but it never did. Either stick with v3.51 or stay away from v4.0. Comodo is lightweight, has a free and full lifetime license, and does everything Outpost did for me. I also tried Sunbelt Kerio before I got to Comodo and that experience was terrible. Kerio is entirely too basic and does not allow for advanced or detailed configuration.

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Mentor

Sniper101

Posted
Posted

Windows Firewall + Hardware firewall (Networking only). There's Mine :) Never been Hacked, compromised nor bypassed. When i didn't have these and i had other Firewalls i was hacked nearly 6 times a month :) now since iv got them both hey presto nothing :) and if you want to Monitor whats connecting to your computer etc Get Microsoft Network Monitor 3 from Microsoft Connect :) its beta still but there are older versions i think.

  • 0
Veteran

Tai

Posted
Posted

Comodo looks interesting from what I've been reading .. might give it a try tonight.

Had Mcafee Personal Firewall plus .. I liked it, but not the control system (ZA was better on that aspect) .. and I think Mcaffee used IE as its ui engine .. which went iffy after I installed ie7 .. then went to ZA Pro .. which totally bogged down my system. if Mcafee improves, I might go back to it.

Anyone got any horror stories with Comodo I should know about beforehand ? :devil:

  • 0
Grand Master

NEVER85

Posted
Posted

I love ZoneAlarm, and their security suite is great because it has everything I would ever need in one place without hogging too many resources.

How is it you never came across the TrueVector crash? ZA works great for me for a couple days and then BOOM, TrueVector crashes.

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