Software Firewall

[Scott_Arm]

Any recommendations on a good software firewall? I have one of those nifty Nforce3 motherboards with the firewall built in, but the damned thing does not seem to work very well.

I have tried Zonealarm in the past, but it has always ended up screwing my internet connection after a couple months. Usually it's awesome for the first little while, and my connection starts to behave as if the ports are all blocked, even when I shut the firewall down. It also wrecks havoc on my pings, and it sucks to play online games with a ping of 250+

So really, I'm looking for a good software firewall that won't totally destroy my pings, and won't mess up my internet connection ... sounds easy

 

[carpediem]

Outpost Pro 2.5, without any doubt. Great control and easy to configure, yet with much better control over what an application can and can't do.

http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpost/

 

[Schadenfroh]

i like the freeware version of sygate and keiro

 

[Scott_Arm]

Cool

Free is always a really big selling point. Tried Kerio. Seems pretty nice. Not sure if it's the best thing around, but it's better than nothing, and FREE. Doesn't seem to make a big impact on my gaming pings either, which is pretty cool. Zonealarm killed my pings, big time.

 

[Vadi]

The Nforce firewall works fine for me. Pings didn't change in games too. What didn't work for you?

 

[rashly]

I'll second outpost pro. You have to pay for it, but it's more than worth it.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Firewall

The Nforce firewall works fine for me. Pings didn't change in games too. What didn't work for you?

Well, I installed the firewall and I was having some problems with my messengers. MSN, ICQ etc would constantly disconnect every minute or so. I was using the medium profile. I made sure all the necessary ports were open in the rules list. Also, I could not get Bittorrent to work without being firewalled. I looked at the FAQ and found all of the TCP and UDP ports that had to be open, but it still wouldn't work. I just had problems like that. I'm not really a networking expert, so I imagine they are problems that could be fixed by a more knowledgeable user.

 

[Vadi]

I don't use that software but Emule works (if that helps).


edit: I use a custom profile which is the medium profile with all TCP/UDP ports denied (no rules) except the ports the wizard opens for you (for Emule I had to open ports of course).

 

[Scott_Arm]

Ok

I'll try it again tonight when I get home ...


Right now I'm at school, tryin' to implement a batch scheduler into the linux 2.4 kernel, which is not going super well.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Cool

Well, I reinstalled the Nvidia firewall stuff. I switched to a custom profile, purged the TCP/UDP rules, and used the wizard to add only the stuff I needed. Then I added a few custom rules on top of that. I have done this before, to no avail. This time, things seemed to be on the same track. I added my custom rules, clicked on apply and things didn't look too bright. Lots of random disconnects from ICQ, MSN and AIM (I use Trillian becuase I have friends on all 3 ... PAIN IN THE ARSE!). But anyway, I rebooted and voila, it's all good now. So I guess the moral of the story is, even though there is an 'Apply' button in the Nvidia network access manager, it doesn't really work until you reboot your system.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Damn

Spoke too soon. After a good 40 minutes of use after reboot, all of my messengers(ICQ, MSN, AIM) disconnected at once, and are now disconnecting and reconnecting once every few minutes .... I also noticed that Soulseek will disconnect from the server as well.

Perhaps it's blocking some kind of ICMP data that's needed to keep the connection alive?

AIM - *** Fatal error (couldn't receive flap): Error Code 10054
ICQ *** Fatal error (couldn't receive flap): Error Code 10054
MSN *** Lost connection to server. Err 10054:-1

I believe error code 10054 in Trillian is 'Connection reset by peer'

 

[Vadi]

Soulseek works for me. After I opened the port it stopped disconnecting. Also I found out that the internet becomes very sluggish when you set local acces to "deny" (I thought that's necessary in order to prevent non-administartors accessing the firewall config, which isn't true). Probably it was just coincidence but maybe setting it to "allow" helps. Sorry, I'm a network newbie.


edit: I read some articles about software firewalls. They said that in Windows it's very easy to circumvent those.

 

[Tim]

i like the freeware version of sygate and keiro

I use the free version of Sygate it works very well.

 

[Vadi]

edit: Ok, Igave up now. It doesn't work.

edit2: Now I know it ain't no hardware firewall. The Nforce4 has a hardware firewall.

 

[Murakami]

Re: Cool

Zonealarm killed my pings, big time.

Me too...

 

[philoni]

If you dont mind paying for a firewall Black Ice is very nice.

 

[_xxx_]

Just tried Sygate and it crashed or rather continuously rebooted my machine until I removed it...