Firewall test info....

I have just conducted a little test to see which firewall was the best, the contenders were:-

Zonaalarm
Kerio
Sygate
Panda
and
Mcafee

The tests were run for 2 days each

What I found was Zonealarm was good at most jobs, but became unstable. It would randomly forget settings. so you had to teach it again.

Kerio Plain and simply that was a load of crap, aways forgot settings, and left several ports open, even after manual intervention.
I also found this a pain in the arse to setup...but at the same time very powerful

Sygate I found this to be a good stable firewall

Panda I found this to be a load of crap, it would work then would not, then it waould stop all communications in the trusted network and internet.

McAfee I am currently running this and found this to be the best so far. It has a good little utility built in for tracing who is pinging you or attempting to break in...

So in order of greatness...IMO

1st Place goes to McAfee
2nd Place goes to Sygate
3rd Place goes to Zonealarm
4th Place goes to Kerio
and last goes to Panda

MH

@ MH, Nice 1, if my troubles at home r due to Z/A i might give McAfee a try.

Good info MH,nice 1 m8

cant beat a router

Mr Napster said:

cant beat a router

Click to expand...

Why's that ?
If you just rely on the router to keep your network behind it secure, you would have to configure the hell out of it

In case you think NAT makes you "invulnerable", then don't Seen enuff machines behind a router dying cause they weren't protected by a firewall.

So where does norton rate in the test MH?as this is what I run I would like to know.Or isn't it even worth testing ?

Think Norton comes close to McAfee, still would recommend Sygate.
Zonelabs.....we use it at work here, and well.....pretty much like a swiss cheese

I did not try Norton, as I heard so meany bad reports about it

I run norton and have done for about 4 years total.And so far it seems to have been bullitproof,but on saying that I've not tried any others really so I couldn't compare norton to anything.2004 internet security seems to be alot more flexible and user friendly than the previous versions and it too has a great bit of kit for tracing people that constantly hit your system.

Another exhaustive test can be found at http://sysopt.earthweb.com/reviews/firewall/index7.html

Well worth reading

Has anyone had a play with Jetico personal Firewall ?h**p://www.jetico.com/jpfirewall.htm

Its still in the beta stage of development but does seem to offer a pretty high level of protection.

useful stuff mh....normally use sygate will give mcaff a spin ....thanks

if you want to test your firewall here is a good site to do it for you...

https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

Hi chaps I have tried most and found that a mate of mine can get into them all quite easily and start mucking about in me system but the one he can't get into is the belkin hardware fiwerwall built in to my router.
hardware is the way to go and you can pick em up very cheap now

Have tried Nortons, Panda and now Zonealarm. The best for me has to be Zonealarm Pro, although the combined package with anti-virus proved troublesome on my laptop and also causes problems if you use broadband but also have an old dial up e-mail account, since it will stop updating via broadband and will only update via dial up, which can be time consuming.

No solution was forthcoming from Zone Labs, although they said they would investigate

You can never have too much security on the Internet now a day.
I try to protect my network the best of my ability,

I use to run no security back in the days as I thought I was untouchable growing up and learning a lot about how the internet works its a scary place. I advise everyone I know a security is am absolute must.

Hardware is getting cheaper like gmac but it can be far to sophisticate and complex for your causal Internet user that said I would still advise strongly to run some sort of protection. Software firewalls are usually a lot more manageable than hardware and has a lot of benefits over hardware one big factor is cost!

My preferred Option
A router and a software firewall

Zone Alarm (Free version) is a good staring point.

When I build my computer over the weekend I will give this firewall a run and post a review, I like to play around with new things. As I don't have any windows machine can't install it I have been using Unix and Mac for the past few months.

reddevil said:

if you want to test your firewall here is a good site to do it for you...

https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

Click to expand...

How good is this
I only have the nat in the linksys and xp sp2 firewall and it said I was fully stealthed
----------------------------
Your system has achieved a perfect "TruStealth" rating. Not a single packet — solicited or otherwise — was received from your system as a result of our security probing tests. Your system ignored and refused to reply to repeated Pings (ICMP Echo Requests). From the standpoint of the passing probes of any hacker, this machine does not exist on the Internet. Some questionable personal security systems expose their users by attempting to "counter-probe the prober", thus revealing themselves. But your system wisely remained silent in every way. Very nice.
----------------------------
Why pay for one of the mentioned ones when I get this result ?

Hi MH

i know u conducted your test a little while ago now but what did u use to test the firewalls u used ?

i have a hardware firewall, an old p2 266 running linux based smoothwall, seems to be running as sweet as a nut, logs filling up with blocked stuff....lol

i have used www.grc.com shields up to test system says all ok, just wondered if u have links to other test sites ?

ellie1998 said:

How good is this
I only have the nat in the linksys and xp sp2 firewall and it said I was fully stealthed
----------------------------
Your system has achieved a perfect "TruStealth" rating. Not a single packet — solicited or otherwise — was received from your system as a result of our security probing tests. Your system ignored and refused to reply to repeated Pings (ICMP Echo Requests). From the standpoint of the passing probes of any hacker, this machine does not exist on the Internet. Some questionable personal security systems expose their users by attempting to "counter-probe the prober", thus revealing themselves. But your system wisely remained silent in every way. Very nice.
----------------------------
Why pay for one of the mentioned ones when I get this result ?

Click to expand...

got the same mate .good to know the pc's secure .
oh and my firewall is a McAfee

heres a present from me h**p://uk.mcafee.com/aol/firewallpremium/download.asp?cid=8345[/url]