I Need a good (FREE) Firewall

Until recently I was using AtGuard personal firewall, which was a great program until Synmantec bough the rights and butchered it (not to mention it costs now).
It will not consistently run on XP without bluescreening me occasionally.
I have looked at several replacements; Outpost, TPF, NPF, and now Jetico PF.

Has anyone out there found a viable alternative to the anemic SP2 (supposed to be) firewall?
I might even be willing to pay for a good one.
I need the flexibility of blocking applications based on port/protocol it tries to access, as well as all the other things most firewalls have.
Pretty is not important, canned setup is not important, but ease of setup and portability is, since I need one to roll out to my notebook users and have a cookie cutter configuration file I can load their setup with.

So far all I've tried failed miserably except Jetico.
It comes close, BUT Jetico is so hard to understand and set up, in spite of it's great price.
(Not much to ask, huh?)

Banjo

 

For a free firewall ....NetVeda is about as good as there is.

There is a thread...and rulesets by Clansman and myself if you care to give it
a try.

 

A friend to me use the free Sygate Personal Firewall, and he like it a lot.

http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm

 

I use Sygate Personal Firewall Pro and I really like it. So far it passed all the tests

Another good firewall that you can try is Look 'N' Stop. It is like an advanced firewall but can also be for novice users . After you are done with the 30 day trial, you can decide if you want to purchase it or you can keep using the "free" version, but it turns into Look 'N' Stop Lite and without app filtering.

Here is the forum for Look 'N' Stop https://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=28

Regards,

snowboard

 

Sygate free runs well (have had problems with Zone Alarm) - also, I might choose Netveda if I can get more detailed alerts.

 

Kerio 2.15
The best firewall, I have tried _ever_

Always starts up
Stable, Never crashed once on me
Free for home use
Easy to use
Simple UI, consistent with Windows native look
Low resources

 

I agree with you squash on Kerio but it is not easy to use at all.

You could always try ZA free.

 

Together with my nat/router I am happy with Sygate free. Easy to install and to operate and nice and clear reportings. No probs with the apps in my signature. I just don't know and maybe don't want to know if it is the best, I am happy with it.
Cheers,

Gerard

 

The abovementioned firewalls are all good, Kerio 2.15 is the best as it uses the least resources followed by NetVeda, Kerio should be combined with BZ rules for best results and in my case, I have CHX as well for the ultimate protection.

 

I use Kerio 2.1.5 and works fine, NetVeda is a good one also.

 

I agree. It does a great job for me for the app contol and logging behind my NAT router. I use OP on my main partition but I have been using/testing Sygate free on my test partion.

My only gripe is it takes too long to start up. Hence.. I've just this week uninstalled it to try Kerio 4.1.3 which does seem to use a lot of memory approx. 24-30MB but it seems unnoticeable and browsing speed doesn't seem to be affected in the slightest. It also starts nice and fast - something I really like about OP too.

 

I would also like to add ZA free to this list, quite good protection out of box with good SPI as well.

 

Does ZA free have app control however?

 

the free zonealarm mostly is missing privacy features. u can check here for the comaprison chart but its hard to tell if its missing app control tho im sure it doesnt.

 

Seems as if it does not have app control per that chart. Which is why I brought it up.

 

Jaguar,

No app control in free ZA, however, it will tell you which programs are trying to access out, for app control, stick to NetVeda of if you feel courageous, check out Jetico, it is pesky but has the best app control out there.

 

I posted a very similar question in the ZoneAlarm forum at CastleCops:

Hoov (Don Hoover) replied that ZA does (still) have outbound protection - the feature in the comparison chart refers to the fact that the paid versions of ZA will look up new applications requesting outbound access in a database at Zone Labs and will suggest an appropriate access setting or, if requested, automatically set the access flags in ZA. The free version of ZA will tell you about outbound applications requesting access and you have to decide whether to let them or not without any help.

HTH

patermann

 

Kerio Personal Firewall 4.1.3 is very good firewall.
It doesn't slow down the internet and web page refresh speed.
Also, Agnitum Outpost is powerfull firewall for security but the web page refresh speed is lower than KPF 4.1.3