A change of firewall?

My zonealarm pro licence is coming up for renewal and I am considering other firewalls................but what?
I have tried outpost but I can't use some functions on sites when using that even with the plug ins removed.
I tried look and stop and found it quick and light but it left many ports visible but closed
I do not consider myself an expert of firewalls, so I suppose ease has got to be a main reason for its use.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks
Rollers

 

ZA is quite good but you can give NetVeda a try, no harm as it is free and quite easy to configure out of box.

 

Try LnS, very good and light.

 

There are so many good free ones available these days.

I recently went through most of them in the search for a decent firewall and ended up with Kerio 4.1.3.

I was very impressed with Sygate, Jetico and FilSecLab as well as the older Kerio versions (2.1.4 & 2.1.5), but have settled on the latest Kerio as the most effective in return for small performance hit and low demands of the user.

 

I have Sygate Pro. I was very tempted to get Outpost Pro but I downloaded the demo version and it's well hard to use. I like Sygate, been using for about a year now and it's very easy to use and has some nice features. .

 

i recommend outpost but since ure having problems then u should try lns and configure it correctly, when i tried it, i passed the port tets at grc so im not sure whats wrong. and lastly i suggest sygate as a last resort. i dont rele like all the other firewalls ive used. u just have to try several firewalls and see which one works for u.

 

Sygate as a last resort??

 

try netveda as arup suggested ..good out of box protection.search the forum for topics about it including a configuration guide by no13..me and quite a few members here are happy with it...
another one u can try is kaspersky antihacker.low resource ,kinda like outpost..
or kerio 4.13,look n stop.i believe outpost is quite easy to configure for a newbie and offers good protection with some ram usage though..

 

i meant it is my least preferred choice.

 

I purchased Outpost just before my other paid-for firewall was due for renewal and received 50% discount from Agnitum to switch, which is not a bad deal.

 

Hi, thanks for your replies. I did try Look n stop once more and this time read and researched more in depth. I this time loaded the enhance rule set ( all looked a bit daunting to start with) and hey ho.............all is very stealthed. I am happy as it seems a very good and light firewall. Then I tried proximatron, and what a good piece of software that is, so now I am fully stealthed, much more private (no referrers showing) and all is running well, so well that I have paid up for look and stop!

Thanks for your time and suggestions guys.

Rollers

 

Watch out for memory leaks in Look N Stop though. I tried running it for a few days here and was very impressed in general, but found that after about 25 hours uptime, it's ram usage for some reason went up from 4 mb to 10 mb. If I opened the GUI, ram usage would dive to 2 mb temporarily, but would then rise up quickly again to 10 mb. So whether this is just the way it is, or whether it's a memory leak in 2.05p2, I don't know.

 

Ahh ok. I thought you might of ment it was a bad firewall and onlu use it you HAVE to.

 

If not using proxy, Sygate free or pro is a very good choice, has excellent packet filtering as well as the best log among firewalls.

 

Heres my 2 cents. I have Sygate Pro and I'm invisible to the web according to all the tests. I also use process guard as added security. I understand that if no one knows your there, there's noone to hack. Sygate isn't the lightest on resources, but it works. And LnS is supposed to the best avaliable currently and very light. Ok 2 cents and then some.

 

I'm no expert, so I certainly don't know for sure, but I think they can tell you're there by your system's lack of response... just makes things a little more difficult for them.

Also, from recent usage here, LsN ran up to 10mb ram use, which puts it after CHX-I and Kerio 2 as one of the lighter firewalls..

 

Sygate Pro also has an easily upgradable IDS signature system, anti spoofing, anti MAC hijacking, DDOS protection, ndis protection etc and these features make it a truly formidable package, the most memory used by Sygate on my PC has been 15mb which is not bad at all.

 

Except for Slammer, blaster and those other pesky new generation automated script tools that attempt to nuke you even if your ip doesn't exist, you're absolutely safe... completely barmy I say.

 

They can tell ONLY when there's a response saying .... "go away, this port is closed" or "There's no service running at this port"
Otherwise, it's like the stealth test @ GRC... no reply = can't say whether the ip or a particular port exists.

 

So they get the same identical response if your system is stealth OR there is nobody at that IP address?

 

Just curious why ZA is not well liked? I too am up for renewal and have used it for a couple of years without problems.

 

Same reason a mule is not romanticized compared to a horse, even though a mule is by far more useful than a horse most of the times.

ZA does its job, sadly it has bad interface for rule creation, they have also been slow in the past to release updates for their bugs. Also their support is not really anything to talk about. Having said all that, it offers good protection out of box and once you have it set up with all your app access, it is pretty much secure.

 

Some criticize it for what would seem to be some bloat due to useless or unnecessary features (such as AV monitoring). Some have criticized it for various problems that the 5.xx versions have had on some systems. And some bash it just because they think they have something better.

It has worked fine for me throughout the years. If it works for you, then that's good too..

 

ZA not well liked? Just because you see folks in forums that do not like it, does not mean it is well liked. ZA is easily the most widely used software firewall for Windows, other than possibly the Windows ICF. And, the ICF only came into widespread use with SP2 which turns it on by default.

 

The other reason for ZA not well liked could be due to its huge number of installed base as compared to other firewalls and therefore due to statistical probabilities, ZA gets the flack as compared to other firewalls.