Any good "free" firewalls out there?

[rjornd]

I've tried Norton (too system resource intensive), Black Ice Defender (too many false positives and been told not too secure), and Zone Alarm (heard that it interferes with some software. I'm currently trying McAfee and it's getting on my nerves with it popping up for no apparent reason. Can anyone tell me if there are any good free firewalls out there?

Thanks in advance,
RJ

 

[Grenage]

Well ZoneAlarm is fine most of the time, you occasionally get a system it will cause a few problems with but not often.

Tiny Personal Firewall is supposed to be good although I have never used it.

 

[AZeemeri]

I don't know if it is any good but the company Kerio has a free personal firewall available as freeware;

http://www.kerio.com/kpf_home.html

 

[wbg34]

I personally like the Kerio firewall over Zonealarm.

 

[SESaskDFC]

Howdy:

I have used most of those mentioned thus far and am now using the Sygate free version and prefer it over any of the others.. Just seems more user friendly to me..

Murray

 

[Sapient2003]

Zonelarm is a bad firewall. You can cause ZoneAlarm to crash if you send too many packets that cause the alert popups to occur. Blackice Defender isn't a firewall, rather just an IDS. Sygate Personal Firewall/Pro (

http://www.sygate.com)

is a great firewall for Windows-based systems. As long as you know the basics in firewall rulesets, you can secure your system well.

--Sapient2003 - sapient@sapient2003.com
"The worst insecurity is believing you are too secure."

 

[VPeter]

Tiny Personal Firewall is free and is really - really good

 

[lullysing]

It depends what it's gonna be used for... a corporate firewall or just J.Random.singlestation firewall?

If it's for a small network, i will always recommend plugging in a cheapo linux box ( say a p2 300ish) to act as a gateway/firewall and just do some iptables rules on it. 100% free and 100% customisable.... but it's just not as ready made as everything else under windows.

IF you want a windows single station solution, why don't you ask your ISP what they have blocked anyhow ( for example, our DSL customers have everything under 1024 mostly blocked, save special stuff. Oh, and port 135, 144 and whatever those other rp vul ports are completely shut off until further notice, for example )?

And how about actually closing all the services you are not using instead of relying on a firewall to do a job that could be done by shutting off everything you don't need? Especially if you are running anything like winNT, win2000 or xp .

Simply put, a firewall will never beat shutting off unessential services from being offered to the world.

--Dave.

 

[bash3r]

I recommend hardware/software firewalling, add a separate box that does the firewalling, put in 2 NICs and place it in between your connection. I've found that Smoothwall has been the BEST firewall that ill run on practically a toaster. We've put it on P133Mhz 16Mb ram and a 520Mb hard drive, 2 NICs and bam firewall, dhcp, port forwarding, ipchains, proxy, vpn all for free and a web interface to configure.

http://www.smoothwall.org

it rocks!