What is available now for a Vista compatible firewall? I know this has been asked before, but things seem to be changing on a daily basis regarding all things Vista. Must have decent outbound application filtering. I was looking at the possibility of using outbound filtering in the native Vista FW, but MS made it too difficult.
Jetico Personal Firewall operating systems support Windows Vista Windows Vista x64 edition Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 x64 edition Windows XP Windows XP x64 edition Windows 2000 http://www.jetico.com/jpf2.htm Jetico Personal Firewall is unique rule based firewall on the market. Its open confuguration does not contain hidden rules and dependencies. You can inspect or modify every bit of configuration.
Choice is quite limited. You could use Jetico 2, Look n Stop, PC Tools Firewall. I like neither of them too much as they are too technical for my needs. Then you can still look for security suites. Bitdefender, KIS, NIS, Avira SS, Mc Afee, PC Cillin, Panda, GData. But maybe I oversee some. I tried several I sticked with NIS for the time being. It's very light and the firewall is kept simple, just what I want. For a overview of firewalls and their OS's look at: http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/links.php#personal-firewalls But it's not updated regularly maybe, as it still doesn't mention that Avira is Vista ready, for example.
I finally managed to get the Vista built in firewall to work with outbound filtering. It is rudimentary at best. The trick is getting windows update to work. Make a custom rule for svchost.exe limited to windows update service, TCP ports 80 and 443. Nearly every other program requiring internet access will be trivial. They probably should have put in a rule for this. The built in networking rules take care of most other chores.
