Light firewall with inbound/outbound protection?

I'm looking for a light firewall, thats semi-easy to use (or easy to use/setup out of the box with a very basic knowledge of networking) with outbound protection, I really like Ghostwall but the lack of outbound bothers me, and AppDefend doesn't work properly for me at the moment, free would be preferable, but pay-for is fine too as long as there is a free trial and its not super expensive (IE, over $30-40), I game quite a bit so I need something that won't interfere with that as much (everything runs good with GW, but no outbound)

 

LooknStop; its a light rules-based firewall and yes it has application control.

The website has rules for some games though maybe youd need to make rules for newer ones.

 

As long as we're talking rule based, Kerio 2.1.5 might also be good as it's very light, uses maybe 5mb ram. Not sure how it would compare with the current LnS though...

 

Some suggestions have been given already. I am currently testing / learning Kerio.

You want simple to set up free and in/out packet control plus gaming?

2 I have used that haven't been mentioned:

CFW version 2 not the beta V3 just being new. Set it on learning mode while rules are being made for you.

PC Tools FW Plus. Easy to set up. Asks you in you want to allow this application and that as you go.

 

Hi Kerodo

From Process Explorer (LnS service and GUI):

 

KPF 2.1.5 was the fw that taught me how to write fw rules. I used
it faithfully for about a year until one day it decided to lose
all its rules without warning and leave me wide open on a dial-up
connection. This was a always a known problem that seemed to happen
especially if Windows had an abnormal shut down. One of the solutions
frequently proffered was to disable write caching to disks. While
that may or may not solve the problem, it can really slow down some
processes on your machine. See how long it takes to overwrite the
page file on shut down with disk caching disabled.

Anyway, I have no solution, but if you search back a couple of years
on the Tiny-Kerio forum at DSLR, you will find it discussed there.

Just thought I'd mention it. Perhaps someone found the answer after
I discontinued using it.

 

CFW? I'm not familiar with it, link please?

 

Comodo Firewall

 

nevermind....I type too slow

 

Ah, is Comodo rule based?

 

Actually I doubt if your system would be left "wide open". If the rules get lost, it would block pretty much everything?

Also I have only lost with my previous quite unstable XP Home PC my kerio 2.x rules only once. Propably was in the same session I played with the rules. Anyways in my experience it happens very rare.

I have made backup copies of my firewall settings with using a date name to a config file and also when i change my system drastically like usign a local proxy when changing to/from Avast AV to an another AV and thus wanting to change kerio 2.x's rules a bit more system wide than normally.

Jarmo

 

Want something light? Build a linux based router out of a mid-range PC...zero slowdown on your rigs. Something like IPCop w/Copfilter, or Endian, or my current favorite...Untangle.

http://untangle.com/

http://endian.it/

http://copfilter.org/

 

what about running it on the same box under VMware? I see that there is alreayd one free VMplayer distro capable of doing that. Overheads may be substantial tho but would make for a very tight setup.

Leonardo

 

You should give Jetico 2 a try, or Look N stop (might be easier to set some rules).

 

Well I'd really like to stray away from rule based firewalls at the moment, I really just don't feel like setting one up right now, for the most part I'm behind a nat router and hw firewall, I just want outbound protection and to have the inbound as an extra layer

 

The OP was looking for easy to setup, and since he games a lot...light. A VMWare solution shoots both of those down IMO.

 

Also a note on the vmware thing, is that all the packets would first pass through the host networking stack anyways, so any problems with the host os might be quite deadly to the setup.

Another thing in favour of look'n'stop is that you can disable its incoming filtering and make it outbound only, which means you could keep ghostwall if you wanted to since you seem to like it so much and be comfortable with it.

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

Alphalutra1

Thanks for this reply it has helped me to understand some VMware communications (that I was always wondering about).

Did not know about the LookNstop outbound only capabilties, I will need to take another look at this.

L.