A reliable site with good information http://www.wilders.org/firewalls.htm

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My machine is also a P233. I tried Sygate and it worked OK but gobbled up a lot of resources and slowed Internet access down considerably. I'm currently using McAfee Firewall and it is the least obtrusive of all. I don't notice it's there. You can get it for $19 if you look around.

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Well I see that ZoneAlarm is used by many, BUT not all! ZoneAlarm is very hard to get rid of, Plus it takes alot of resources up. I would install Kerio Personal Firewall. Kerio is a Twin brother to TINY Personal firewall. Kerio is also Better than Zonealarm & Sygate, BUT this is my own Opinion

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georges and Ghostman 1 first of all what type of system do you have ghost man becaue it does come with a good unintaller. Kerio wouldn't be a great choice first of all when chosing a personal home firewall you need something that works bothways and make the ports act as if there in stealth mode. and Georges wrong answer about having a firewall not installed just because it's an old system first of all have 7 computers here one of them just happens to be a 233 still runs great. no matter what type of computer anyone has people need some type of security on there system in order to protect what's out the in todays world. make me sick when people give advice like this. just shows to me that they need to open there eyes to what's really out there.

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Sygate firewall pro 5 or zonealarm, norton firewall is ok but expensive

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I suggest Outpost Firewall 1.0 Free: - it's as you can see free - it closes all ports - it's really fast and... it's from Cyprus:) I used it on my Pentium200. Worked good.

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Hi, Zone Alarm (Free version) is generally recognized as good security but ....... for whatever reason once in a while it just went wild and opens up everything ! ! I don't think this has to do with a hacker, the program itself just decides to take on an eagle trip whenever ! Exit and reenable Zone and everything goes fine again. Just want everybody to be on the alert, not thinking that Zone protects you every minute. It takes only a minute for a hacker to realize that you are suddenly without protection 'cause they are constantly scanning ! The best Firewall these days I can find is Kerio ! Superb, nothing to compare in detailed settings ! You can add as many rules as you want to block single port, or multi ports, single address or all, single program or all programs, differences of in's or out's settings, or combination of these settings, the types of protocol setting etc. Editing after rules setting up is also easy. I even set up extra TCP block to block Netscape from phoning home, which action otherwise actually gets away without notice because by default, some of the phoning functions of legitimate programs are not blocked by these Firewalls. You will just have to suspects, just have to know what to look for, and set up your own blocking rules. I suspect that most of the legitimate programs do do you-wash-my-back - and-I-wash-your-back stuffs ! On the other hand, automatically blocking wise, Zone blocks 2 while Kerio already does 80 incoming blocks ! Yes, Zone is too lazy, stuffs kept coming through and went out easily until I got Kerio, then I found out just how safe I was with Zone before ! Perhaps the paid-for Zone version can be better, I am not sure, never paid for a Zone yet. But as always, any of these security programs are actually spyware itself ! ! Every Firewall phones home, Even browser, M/S Explorer, M/S Internet Explorer, Netscape Browser, no difference, everyone wants to share that piece of the pie ...... Info on what customers wants, how customers set their browser, what other similar programs customers have in their machines, where surfed etc etc) Lastly, I had the 30 days (Was it 30 days ? ?) free trial version of Sygate Firewall, it gave me only one day’s use and declared that my time were up ! It then refused to work anymore :-) So I deleted the darn thing and called it the day ! By the way, talking about slowing down ‘puters, I use both Kerio and Zone in one 266Hz ‘puter, work together just fine fine, no clash no clash. Removed the third which was BlackIce. This Firewall does terribly, it blocks only what’s in, not what’s out. However, both Kerio and Zone together do not take up unreasonable resources neither. I start that 266Hz with resource at beginning between 70 and 75%, at no time less than 65%. And while under heavy use, never drops below 50% and this is only 266, hey ! ! ! I call this “Excellent”, just you have to know what to do. In that ‘puter, only essential programs starts automatically, anything else is manual start, takes another half a minute or so extra time, not bad at all. But if your resource is low though, suggest also checking and take out some of the spywares working in the background that you probably know nothing of. Use Adaware to remove these Critterwares, that’s what I want to really call them, “Critterwares” ! However, yes I do admit, overall, 266 class is slow workers by today’s standards, especially on heavy downloads even at high resource reserves ! Highlife was here, Ciao !

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Hi, I have an obvious correction here : "MHz", not "Hz". Silly me, they are slow alright, but can't be that that that slow ! :-( Sorry folks. For Mike S, I have a suggestion, because 233Mhz is still not that bad, just that you have to do some additional rams. 32 is really too little for todays' works ! Ram prices have crumbled down a long slide in recent years, they are in fact pretty cheap these days. So try 64 or little more if money guides you out that way. This will help out on your speed problem more than any other resource help. Ciao !

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Harry Highlife would have to disagree with you on the zonealarm thing i've been using it sence it's came out and zone alarm just doesn't open ports at random unless you tell it to. not only that depends on how You configured yours if you had yours on stealth mode then you should have been ok.

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Harry Highlife why don't you check out my little article on this post http://www.computing.net/security/wwwboard/forum/1349.html this should tell you were im coming from.

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Jon my friend, You did not understand what I said, sorry. I meant, Zone would go completely OPEN, The whole program becomes totally disabled by itself ! ! Of course this does not happen every day, just once in a long while. And this has nothing to do with configuring any setting. Do you do understand that I did not mean any port opened at ramdom now ? Thank you for reading my post properly ! Highlife.

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Hi :-), First off, I know this will be a longer post than usual again, so I would like to thank you all for reading it through. Apparently, Jon “Suffers” from the same symptom that I suffered a long time ago. That is, if you continue to use only one single Firewall, mind you, you are indeed missing so much and thought you were safe, especially of the confidence added up by fondness through the years of using this particular program ! The only way to really tell the truth is to use a few Firewalls at the same time FOR A WHILE. Because Jon, we can only tell by COMPARISON. Because even a frog will become the king of the water kingdom if there is no other fish around. But a Wale is indeed in reality a king to a frog even when it is not in this same pool of waters ! You will have to forgive my ignorance, but please tell me how do you configure Zone to block outbound TCP used by Netscape for example and not blocking off the entire Netscape ! You can’t, can you ? Once you allow Netscape in Zone, you allow this program to carry out any activity whether it is in or out, whether it is TCP or UDP or ICMP or Dynamic Host arrangement info packets, whether it is one port of another that this program uses. Can you limit Explorer to use only a particular port and not another port in Zone ? No, you can’t ! See, I have used Zone for a while too and gotten familiar with it, and I am continuing using it too. What happens is, mind you, sometimes you might have a program that is supposed to help, and mind you, it helps really. But at the same time they change your ‘puter’s settings without telling, they check on your ports without you knowing because you have allowed these info to freely go out once you have allowed that helpful program through Zone. As you know, there are a lot of exploits on browsers, actually with Netscape6, a hacker can EASILY set up his own program as a client to your ‘puter through your browser while you are surfing. But if you allow only a particular protocol to go through without the others, chances are that you can eliminate all or eliminate to a degree, packets from a hacker sending through another port other than the one port that the browser is using for legitimate purposes. That is again don’t forget, if you allow your browser to only use one port number and not any other. My same question for you again in specific is, with Zone, how do you allow Explorer for example, to use port 70 for example and not using port 1000 ? Kerio can ! This is one of the reasons why so many times you have a “Good” Firewall but you don’t know how you got hit but you got hits anyhow even though you were being “Careful” surfing ! How well, perhaps you don’t have so many port hits as some of us do, so you cannot actually tell the difference as clearly as we do. A few years ago, I really did not have a problem like hackers/spammers and such’s. Any Firewall would have been good enough for me back then. At one time, I even surfed actually without a Firewall. But time changes rapidly, this is the progress of computering ! Have a good day, Harry.

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harry harry, what you don't know about me is that i am a hacker i have been sence i was 14, do you think i only use one firewall haha nice try but for being open like you said. how did you come to this ? first of all your pretty stupid if you allow windows explore to even access the internet or any network at that.see a person like myself will have a fun day with a setting like that. doesn't matter how secure you think you are. if you have poor defence and settings on your firewall. it will matter not if you have firewall or not. if you talkking about IE port 80 for http. not only that if you really know how to set up a firewall then you would know how to block ICMPS and UDP ports. thought i would let you in a little back ground also to who i am. i am an Information Security manager for a large corp. so i do know a little about firewalls and security . second of all for netscape if you have it configured correctly then you should have no problem in letting netscape through. and yes about explore you can limit to use only a particular port. what version are you using of zone alarm? it's under program control under that progam there are settings there. as with zonealarm you can block packets. not sure were your coming from on this not only does and can block fragments ARP protection that's if you know what that is. first of all bud i never get hit by anyone never have and never will..GOES BACK TO WHAT I SAID HARRY , IF YOU HAVE THE FIREWALL CONFIGURED CORRECTLY FOR LOGGING AS WELL AS SETTINGS THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE NO PROBLEM NOT ONLY THAT BE AWARE OF MELWARE. YES I DO UNDERSTAND PORTS AT RANDOM AND IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING CONFIGURED CORRECTLY THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT FOR OPEN PORTS. HOW DID YOU SCAN YOUR FIREWALLS. DID YOU EVER TRY TO HACK INTO YOUR OWN SYSTEM TO SEE HOW SECURE IT REALLY IS. have you ever heard of an IDS system and a honybot i should give you my ip if you can find and see how well you scan nice day joe i just wanted to tell you harry not to show you up or anything seeing that i do test products to the full extent

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Ha, Joe, let me be plain and be stupid like somebody I just know, so I would have to say, you are a joke. Bet you, half of what you were talking about, you didn't know about. Of course I knew of the things you were talking about. But the point is, you don't know what I was talking about. You "Tested" me on simple children level things like ICMP blocking, like IDS programme etc etc. You were mumbling about the same line over and over again, about setting up programmes correctly. I was not saying that anyone should not get hit if you did not set up Firewalls correctly. Of course, it is so simple Joe, if you do not setup anything correctly, nothing should work correctly, Firewall or otherwise ! I was then talkng about, most importantly Joe, that, if you copmpared between Zone and Kerio, you should notice the differences. But you failed to bring references of your comparison. You kept mumbling on with the Zone alone. Tell you what Joe, please go to test the two programmes side-by-side, for a while at least, then come back, we will discuss again. As it is now, it can be too difficult to "Discuss" over something that someone has no knowledge of, because then Joe, anything will become dead arguments instead of a plain discussion. How much do you know about Kerio Joe ? ? By the way, you said you were a hacker, fine, I am not a hacker I admit, but I do know about hacking techniques. Because I am an experimenter who does experiments from real rocket technique to computers, to electronics, and to many other things too long to mention Joe. I could hack through very fine from one computer to another of my own on different internet connections. I do experiments to see how well security programmes work, but I don't do the literal dirty jobs like you do. By the way, may I say, that you are rude dear Joe :-) PS : Joe, on your next post, if you do display the same attitude and ways, count me out please, I will not answer, I will not come here to these columns for that. I am interested in honest-to-truth discussions ONLY, and to assist others because sometimes I do need help myself no matter how much one knows ! Have a god day Joe. Harry Highlife.

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I do like to apologize to Joe and everyone who reads my last post. I was rude to Joe, but he deserved it :-) Just teasing. (How else can I bring it to your attentions if not had you stood on your toes ?) :0) But what I really want to say in this post is, please, you people please listen carefully, because this thread started off with a reader trying to get a FREE version of Firewalls and asking which were the best. The comparison I was making all along in every post were of course between two FREE Firewalls, not any other paid-for version ! Now, the Free Zone Alarm is fine to use, simple enough to entry users if he or she does not have a deep security problem. BUT, it is important to note that, with Zone Alarm Free version, noone can set the Firewall to allow lets say Port 80 to go through, but refuses ICMP, or port 110 within one same particular programme, ie, a browser. Kerio can do this thjough and it is also a FREEE version. This means simply, with Kerio, you can surf on one port, but secure on another. Zone Free version cannot do this. If you ere to block ICMP, you were to be blocking also the port 80 http, normal for surfing. This is just a simple example. I am sure that I have failed to get this through to Joe and perhaps some other readers in the previous three posts three times. In his last post, Joe informed me to check under "Programme" in Zone Alarm for these setting, but there is no setting as such in Zone Alarm whatsoever, I noticed this from the time beginning. And this brought up the entire question of precision blocking which Zone Alarm FREE version could not do, but Kereio FRREE version could ! No matter, this is the fourth times that I am clarifying the same thing ! Again, take my apologies nicely Joe, and live on :-) :-) Have a nice surf. Harry.

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