How difficult is Outpost to learn?

Mercurie, I don't think you'll regret your decision. It's a good solid firewall with a very good forum as well.

 

Yes, thank you everyone for all the helpful replies.

 

The Stateful Inspection FAQ at the Outpost forum gives more explanation about stateful inspection generally and when Outpost's extra SPI is likely to be useful. The "standard" level of stateful inspection (at network/packet level) is the same as that done by most other personal firewalls.

CHX-I does promise a higher level of SPI but does not seem to offer "full application-level SPI" and does not offer application filtering (important for identifying any malware that slips past your other defenses and tries making a network connection). To that extent, I would suggest that it is better suited as a proxy server/ICS gateway firewall (like InJoy firewall) than as an end-user firewall (where application filtering is most needed).

A good (techincal) discussion on Stateful Inspection can be found from page 2 onwards on the Firewall with these features?? thread.

 

Thanks Paranoid for the information. So it seems that Outpost does indeed do some SPI by default at some level even without the SPI flag in the app rules on. That's good...

You are right about CHX-I also.. I like it much, but have recently taken to Tiny for a while, which is about as far from CHX-I as you can get I guess..

Thanks for the links....