Really Really Powerful Inbound Protection

is shieldsup still the best site to test the firewall, hardware or software yet?

 

Maybe this is a joke? only an enterprise piece of hardware worth big $$$ will provide "Really Really Powerful" protection anyway. Seeking this for your home pc is a complete waste of time and money. Windows fw or a home NAT router or one of the many 3rd party fw's will provide more than adequate inbound protection. You can scan 'til the cows come home, but you will always get "stealthed" on even the most basic fw. Big deal.

 

It will only test your ports, and it will provide completely misguided information on so called stealth, ping etc. Also, for most people it will test their router instead of the FW on their computer without them even realizing it.

Details in this thread.

 

More about it in this thread:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=215028
and here:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=241856

 

MATOUSEC HAS HIPS TESTS. NOT INBOUND/OUTBOUND FIREWALL TESTS!

 

Untangle Home Free Edition costs.... 0$$$.

Panagiotis

 

pandlouk beat me to it...Untangle

I use a hardware appliance with a second router separating the family computers from my little network, windows firewall and cfos which has a very nice little firewall and excellent traffic shaping for my limited 8Mb connection.

cfos - traffic shaping/layer 7 protocol detection/state inspection/rtp check/ip blocker.

other suggestions relating to op...

snort
smoothwall
m0n0wall

installed/VMs

 

so...hardware needs a software firewall like windows firewall or a better one?.
and...does any site provide a truly firewall report -hardware and software-

 

I'm satisfied with LooknStop but I'll do an image restore and try Untangle later.
Will it work even if I don't have a router?

 

Thanks. Is there no relationship that would indicate the inbound/outbound protection?

Regards,
Jerry

 

Yeah, the Untangle or similar option is nice and practical for the hobbyist/enthusiast, but I doubt it's gonna be embraced by the average joe, having to build their own fw with a reasonably powerful spare pc just kicking around the house. I wanted to try this actually, but my oldest pc I recently took to the recyclers wasn't even up to snuff to meet the hardware requirements.

 

Uhm... You need to disable any router/gateway/whatever other firewalls if you want to test the one on your computer for incoming traffic protection.

Other than that - the usual online tests like GRC test incoming ports stuff only - open/closed/stealth, that's pretty much it.

 

not ..i have a westell versalink from verizon,and on dslreport there is a set of rules for it inbound and outbound.....and i have windows firewall.
but i thought something else is neccesary.

 

for anyone not wanting to build a firewall with the spare pc, there are software and vm versions knocking about.

Untangle can also be installed into Windows. Astaro has a vm - they are all extremely easy to use.

 

Once again, with another firewall already filtering traffic before it's reached the computer you are trying to test, you can't test anything at all.

 

I have fixed my post & link to the FREE version of Look n Stop, Look ‘n’ Stop Lite.

 

seems a bit outdated and not for xp!?
from 2006 - reason why i dropped outpost 3.51 last year although it had all neccessary for me.

 

I recommend Kerio 2.1.5 too if you want a firewall with excellent logs, or Sygate 5.5. Both work on XP but I doubt they are compatible with Vista/Win7.

 

I remember that I had a famous BSOD with Kerio 2.1.5 on old XP machine (fwdrv.sys driver error).

 

Thanks, I was looking for this one a while back, and never found it.

 

here you go with a whole bunch of others also.

http://www.klitetools.com/index.php?action=news&catid=47

 

^ Zactly ^ A good hardware based solution is always the best. It stops the attacks before they ever get to your computer and takes the resource strain off of it. The only reason I use a software firewall in addition is because of the nice, granular, simple rule setting, and outbound/application rules. If you're not worried about those latter two things though, and solely about inbound protection, go get yourself a hardware firewall with SPI.

 

Even a "hardware" firewall runs software.

A better way of putting it might be that what is best is a dedicated firewall that is separate from the desktops and servers that users interact with.

 

Yeah, for the sake of accuracy that is the better way to put it. Anyhow I think most people agree that it's the single best security tool you can have... after of course end user know-how, which there is so substitute for.

Even the SPI I mentioned is overkill. A simple NAT router = gold.

 

Define "lite".