Beta 1A & coincidental strangeness over LAN

[rturner]

I hesitate to post this, as it probably has nothing to do with the new beta, but maybe some here have noticed something similar.

The good news, on my test machine, Windows XP Pro SP2, the 1a beta installed with none of the other problems I'm reading about.

The bad news, strange things started happening on my small office LAN until I turned off the firewall. Again, this might well be coincidence in timing, nothing to do with the beta. Anyway, connections along the LAN worked fine right after the install on the test machine, in all directions. Then our main server couldn't see several shares on other machines (the Eset beta wasn't even installed on it - just my test machine). A couple hours later they came back. Part of the LAN is wireless to laptops. The two laptops suddenly couldn't see the LAN. I ended up having to reset the wireless security in the router and they behaved normally again. Then an accounting app that I run (over the LAN) off the main server started crashing on my test machine (the machine with the beta). In general, a lot of small annoyances that could really be anything without watching packets over a couple hours. Something unknown was probably causing a lot of collisions. Coincidentally, I stopped the firewall part of the beta and we've had no network problems in the three days since. So now, I'm really just using the AV part of it.

Through the years, strange things have happened with other personal firewalls, Zone Alarm, the Windows firewall, even firestarter on the linux machines, so on our office LAN, we don't use them, just a hardware firewall. I was trying Eset to see if there was any improvement because I like NOD32 so much.

[IcePanther]

Hi,

I know firewalls can be troublesome at times... For example, my ISP provides a TV-through-DSL service, and all you have to do is allow VLC media player (which is used to connect to it) in the firewall to accept all in/out UDP packets coming from a virtual local IP (which is in fact an IP emulated by the modem the ISP leases).
With ESS, I had some problems connecting to it, in fact, the prompt took too much time to appear, and that completely crashed the network, I had to reboot both the router and the modem, don't know exactly why, only it doesn't happen with other firewalls (namely, OP and KIS). Once the rule is created, all goes well. It may, or may not, be directly related to the way ESS handles (incoming) connections, it may as well be an incompatibility with this single router.
And it's a problem I could reproduce as many times I want.

(this is only an example, other firewalls have their problems too, I recall with OP that, when UPnP was enabled, it would crash the network when my gf sent me custom emoticons in MSN Messenger, and on the opposite, de-activating it caused some other problems... so well, no piece of software is perfect)

So maybe it has some incomaptibilities with your network, too.