Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

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nagan
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Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by nagan »

My requirements are simple...
I require just a Firewall ,not a HIPS package.For HIPS I have the great Online Armor ,but it is not flexible for my Firewall needs.
1.Capability of fixing action mode "ALLOW",BLOCK","ASK" from a list of programs which has accessed the net.
2.Ability to set port rules with wild card entries for certain programs like FF which merrily wanders on its own on certain ports!

ZA is flexible with POINT 1 but a BSOD contender ,with lots of crashes.
PC TOOLS seems to be the next bet with POINT 2,but harps more on HIPS ,and is very very slow.
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Giorgio Maone
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by Giorgio Maone »

I use Comodo on my Win boxes.
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nagan
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by nagan »

Comodo is very noisy with its HIPS.
Dreams are REAL possibilities. Pursue them with zest and you can make them HAPPEN!
You are GOD.Realize THAT!
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Giorgio Maone
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by Giorgio Maone »

nagan wrote:Comodo is very noisy with its HIPS.
But you can easily configure it not to.
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GµårÐïåñ
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by GµårÐïåñ »

I was going to recommend Comodo as well like Giorgio did and yes you can configure it to be learning mode which makes it ALOT less noisy and it will run in more passive mode but you risk allowing something YOU may not want. So there is that trade off with less noise. You could also try ZoneAlarm's free personal firewall, I personally don't like it but to each their own, and there is also another one I use in one of our VM that I can't remember off the top of my head but will add later.
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nagan
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by nagan »

I do not know about newer versions of ZA. But it is a potential BSOD initiator.Whenever I switch off the router and restart it I get BSOD without fail.Also uninstalling ZA completely is a hard task. Might be I will try the comodo dragon. What is the memory size and does it slow down the speed? I was wondering why to go for a voluminous HIPS based firewall and also keep the HIPS silent.
Dreams are REAL possibilities. Pursue them with zest and you can make them HAPPEN!
You are GOD.Realize THAT!
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GµårÐïåñ
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by GµårÐïåñ »

Yes that's why I don't like ZA. :)
As for Comodo, it _CAN_ bog the system down and has on occasion caused systems to hang, slow and even crash but depends on how much noise you generate with it, normal learning mode seems pretty passive and goes fairly smooth. Plus you can turn the prompt level really low.
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Giorgio Maone
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by Giorgio Maone »

nagan wrote:What is the memory size and does it slow down the speed?
Right now the reported working set I can see (i.e. the real RAM occupation) is 8MB for the front-end (cfp.exe) and 7MB for the background service (cmdagent.exe).
It never hanged my PCs during the last year, even though some "unlearned" process might (obviously) fail if you're not quick at managing permissions before socket timeouts.
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GµårÐïåñ
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by GµårÐïåñ »

Yes well said, its the unlearned process that timed out can cause issues.
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Tom T.
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by Tom T. »

nagan wrote:I do not know about newer versions of ZA. But it is a potential BSOD initiator.Whenever I switch off the router and restart it I get BSOD without fail.
FWIW, I've been using ZA Free Home (firewall only) for almost 9 years with a wireless router for the past 4 years, and never had any such problem. Some sort of conflict in your router's settings and in ZA's, I would guess without knowing more. I don't like the way ZA has bloated over the years, but when I poked into it, I found out that they were d/l the *full PRO suite* into your machine, although the Pro features were locked out without a license key. Well, surprise, I just deleted all of these suite-related files (in Safe Mode), in both Program Files and in win\system32\ZoneLabs, and cut this 60+ MB total to less than 11MB between those two locations combined. (For fun and practice in learning to edit XML, I cut win\system32\ZoneLabs\osfwrules.xml from 375k to less than 16k, just by deleting all lines relating to the unused Pro Suite functions.) Functions flawlessly, although do this at your own risk, of course. Uses about 17 MB RAM total, close to the 15 total mentioned for Comodo.
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by user78 »

Agnitum recenly released free version of its Outpost Firewall - http://free.agnitum.com/. It shows very good results according to matousec's test (93%, third place) - http://www.matousec.com/projects/proact ... esults.php.
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by Tom T. »

skinandvein wrote:I need suggestions for a good antivirus and firewall FREE! that will work on vista. Can you help?
Avast and Avira offer anti-virus free for personal, home use only. Both support Vista. I have used both and like them. Avast team member luntrus is a frequent and excellent contributor on security issues at this forum, for which we are grateful. But you have to search the site a bit to find the free version. ;) ZoneAlarm, by ZoneLabs, offers a firewall free for personal home use, also said to be compatible with Vista. See my above post - I've used ZA for years. However, I don't have Vista, so can't speak on the compatibility of any of the above.

This is this user's personal experience and opinion only, shared in response to your request, and must not be regarded as an endorsement by this site, its admin/developer, or anyone else.
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Re: Suggest a good FREE Firewall.

Post by therube »

I was wondering why to go for a voluminous HIPS based firewall and also keep the HIPS silent.
Excellent point.
Though one might liken it to running NoScript in Allow Globally mode, while at the same time retaining other protections that it affords.

I run an old version of Zone Alarm Free (5.5.094) on one box & Windows Firewall on the other.
No issues with either.
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