Need a basic firewall, what to chose?

Hello fellow firewallers. With the extensive knowledge and experience the users of this forum has, maybe someone can help me. I am in need of a software firewall, a firewall not equipped with a lot of bells and whistles, no spyware/malware control, no antivirus, just a basic firewall.

I do have a few demands though.

1. Easy to understand and configure, yet powerful enough to do its job in a proper manner.

2. Application control! As my main concern is to control all the outgoing traffic, i need a firewall that supervise outgoing traffic and automatically alarms me when something is trying to access the Internet so i can chose allow/deny rules for that. I have a router with a SPI firewall and it works great for incoming traffic.

3. If possible, low on resources of course, as little overhead as possible is welcome.

I was thinking about Zone Alarm Free, what other solutions could be feasible for my needs? Suggestions are welcome, commercial products aswell as freeware.

Thanks in advance!

 

a firewall not equipped with a lot of bells and whistles

Any two way firewall is equippted with the above

I would suggest Windows Firewall in XP SP2 ,but if you wish

2. Application control! As my main concern is to control all the outgoing traffic, i need a firewall that supervise outgoing traffic and automatically alarms me when something is trying to access the Internet so i can chose allow/deny rules for that. I have a router with a SPI firewall and it works great for incoming traffic

then I recommend ZoneAlarm free

 

Older versions please! As the new ones are bloatware.


For instance:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=136303

However I would stay away from the free version of this FW. It's a nuisance comparable to Norton.

Choose Jetico 1 (hard to configure though), Sygate (as long as you don't run a proxy), Kerio 2.1.5 or wait for Comodo 2.3 instead (due to be released on September 1, late afternoon), as this new version will have the CPU usage reduced.

 

Thanks for answers, i went for ZA Free which so far seems to meet my demands pretty well. Pretty low on resources, only 9 mb memory consumption on my puter. I must admit though that ZA wasnt the first firewall that came to mind when looking for alternatives, heard an awful lot of bad things about it the last year or so.....but, so far so good. I´ll look at the other suggestions also, thank you for them, gesc!

EDIT. Mistake here, the memory consumption (vsmon+zlclient) is more around 30 mb, not 10......

 

E-Buzz

1) whatever takes your fancy for GUI.. no one firewall is perfect for all.

2)Application control and controlling outbound traffic is one of the more important tasks of modern firewalls. Of course the effectiveness of outbound checking is measured with "leak tests". At least this is something you can test to find the best solutions if this is the most important criteria for you. you can find lots of tests on www.firewallleaktester.com

3)Resource usage: again, lots of info on this for you to find out how much is mem consumption for each firewall.

Melih

 

I totally agree on that!

Nothing to add there, i totally agree on this too. Today is hopefully the big and much anticipated "the Comodo 2.3 release day" and i will of course test that one as i´ve heard so many nice words about it. Actually really looking forward to that, im not a big fan of ZA and havent been for years now, so if Comodo does its job and does it well i will most certainly change to that. Thanks for your input, btw.

 

I would go with the free Sygate firewall (5.5.2710)
http://www.firewallleaktester.com/mirror/firewalls/spf5.5b2710.exe
The recent versions of ZoneAlarm are too bugged to even be installed.

 

Been using Sygate quite a lot earlier, i have nothing bad to say about that firewall. Thanks for the tips, didnt know they still had a free version avail.

 

I would think twice about that one: http://www.firewallleaktester.com/tests_overview.php

 

Yeah i saw that one, not very impressive at all. Waiting for new Comodo

 

That's the route I would take.

I like the 2.3.3.33 beta.

 

Just installed the final release, looks awesome and works very nice! Highly recommended!

 

Searching post....
Melih how could you forgot the best firewall our so far and you own it!
By the way everyone im using 2.3 right now and its amazing! Its fun watching everyone on the forum adding a post just to remove the boredom of staring at the screen all day waiting for the release and then they found out it was postponed 1 day they turned into Snakes On A Plane!