A really good firewall

Has anybody any suggestions for a really light weight firewall but one that has still first class protection. Paid or free, it doesnt matter, all suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

A really good light free firewall that has app control is Kerio 2.1.5 or Jetico. A really good light paid firewall is Look'n'Stop.

A really good light weight firewall with only inbound filtering is CHX-I, followed by Ghostwall.

That should cover your questions(only use ONE).

Alphalutra1

 

I've tried Jetico, NIS 2005, NIS 2006, Sygate, Netveda, Kerio 2.x and 4.x, and LookNStop. Of all of them, I like LNS the best. It configures easy, has never crashed for me, has excellent support in the LNS forum here at Wilders, and it has a one time fee of $39 (instead of annual subscriptions). You can try it for 30 days before buying.

pb

 

I recommend CHX-I (which is free as stated above) if your only interest is to stop inbound attacks, and JeticoPFW if you are concerned about controlling network access to software on your computer:

CHX-I: www.idrci.net

Jetico Personal Firewall: www.jetico.com

And with all due respect, I would normally recommend Look 'n' Stop, but it seems as if the most secure versions of it stay in beta for Far too long.

 

I'm giving Jetico a try but i have problem already, if i try to access the internet i have to set my security policy to allow all. Having it set to this sort of defeats the purpose of having a firewall in the first place. Any Jetico users past or present got any advice?

 

See this thread below on Jetico. You should choose optimal protection!

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=121009

 

How about this firewall: Comodo Personal Firewall
www.comodo.com

It seems really good, but does not seem to be popular amongst many people, i rarely hear about this firewall. I tried it out myself and it seems really good.

 

How about its resources usage (CPU and RAM)?

 

From what i've been hearing, Jetico offers a free firewall that passes all the leak tests and uses minimal resources. But it's also been said to be annoying, and rules have a hard time sticking.

Comodo passes all the leaktests but is generally a dinosaur.

Zone Alarm is a newbie friendly choice and it offers good protection. Though it used to have a problem slowing or even stopping network connections for no reason (my experience that is).

Kerio 4 is my default choice. It's a mix between newbie friendly and yet still configurable. It's also cheap cheap. 20$ or less for extra features (still free if you don't want the features). You can thank Sunbelt Software for saving Kerio too.

The free version of Outpost is good but sometimes doesn't work properly for me.

 

Jetico does not pass ALL the leaktests, but it passes most of them. I think at this point only Commodo does. Although I haven't used Commodo yet, I've heard that it is very resource heavy.

 

It's discontinued but still can be had. Sygate personal (free) or pro firewall. It's great.

 

true. I recommend you have 1gb of ram before using this firewall. It performs real well though.

 

Although many users have already suggested Comodo, I have just put an end to my 'new program skepticism' and installed it. It ******* rocks! It passes every known leaktest, has a beautiful Graphical User Interface, has rather good network filtering abilities, has awesome technical support (which also happends to be rapidly prompt in response time), is TOTALLY FREE at the time of this posting, and this is one long run on sentence!

Only drawback I can advise of is resource usage, I would guess around 30MB.

If you like Jetico, this is for you!

Edit: I couldn't seem to get my spelling right the first time

 

I found that it sometimes can get real noisy like Jetico with lots of popups (no wonder it can pass leaktest

Also, to eliminate some pop-ups you could uncheck "moniter parent application leaks" in "enable application behavior analysis" section in the "advanced security configuration". Be aware though that you are decreasing your security a bit, even though protection strength is still on excellent. Also the basic popup logic is self explainatory.

Does use lot of resources so make sure you have alot of ram in your computer.

Also it seems to function more like an IDS/HIPS system, even though it handles NIPS just fine. Very heavily into protection from trojans, malware, etc. As you can see it in the logs, it shows only malware attempts but no network attacks. Hope it will provide more detail on network attacks in its logs in future versions.

 

Are you all sure about that?

Firewallleaktester.com shows that no firewall passes all it's leaktests.

 

Comodo has a new version(v2) not tested at firewallleaktest.com

Alphalutra1

 

CPIL.EXE test is pretty decent and looks like it can easily slip past some firewalling but CyberHawk plus System Safety Monitor snag it before it gets a chance to drop it's dll.