Fire Wall on Dual Processor

[dasmith]

I realize this is not really a WIN2000 question but since my machine is running WIN2000 I will ask here.

So far my search has revieled that two common/popular firewall programs are not supposed to work on Dual processor machines: Norton (which causes the slowest shut down I have seen), and Zone Alarm (which seems to cause blue screen when running Outlook). Both their web sites state that dual processor systems are not supported.

Does anyone know the reason for this apparently common problem of firewalls?

Does anyone know of a fire wall that is supposed to work on a dual processor machine?

 

[butchrecon]

Not supporting dual processors just means that the firewall wont "see" the other Chip. If you are getting errors with the firewalls after installing them then I would suggest checking how they are configured. I could be wrong, but I have never seen a program throw a fit because of 2 processors. They usually ignore the other one.

 

[dasmith]

Thanks for the reply.

The reason I posted was for two reasons.

1: The manufacturers had both stated it would was not compatable. The Snale-like shut down that Norton caused was clearly unacceptable though I do not know if this was due to the dual processor. Zone alarm did appear to work ok though their web site stated that it would not. Zone Labs has recently answered my inquiry stating that their program did work on some dual processor systems but not on others - reasons unknown. They did suggest forcing the processor affinity of all zone alarm components to the same processor if it did not work. Not sure how to do this but I am not too concerned about that for now.

2: I had been experiencing a problem with intemittent reboots while running IPX games. At the time I had narrowed it down to either Zone alarm or ASUS PC probe. PC probe is now the main suspect.

Also I found that the problem can be resolved by turning off the automatic reboot on system failure in Win2k. It appears that Win2k is a little too anxious to reboot. That was with SP1. I now have SP2 installed but have not retested for this problem.