How does WinRoute Compare?

[mrpost]

Hello,

I'm seriously looking for a replacement to my Linksys product and am considering a software solution. I've heard good things about three products in this area, WinRoute,WinGate and WinProxy. Can someone (other than the Kerio folks) share their experinces with any of these products?

Thanks

 

[plymstock]

I had WinRoute Pro set up on W98 PCs. It took a while to get the configuration right, but after that it worked fine. After switching to broadband I stopped using WinRoute because (sad comment, this!) my children wanted to use MS Messenger and I couldn't get it running behind WinRoute's NAT firewall. So I'm now running MS's ICS & Kerio's Personal Firewall (same engine as WinRoute... whatever that means!). If it weren't for the children, I'd still be using WinRoute.

 

[OCeuppens]

Hi,

I just want to point out ofr your benefit that :
- winroute is an actual NAT router & firewall
- wingate and winproxy are more "connection sharing" tools (with not much security)
- with the new winroute 5, configuring as become a lot easyer (and it does allow MSN messenger, without any problem)


Olivier.

Olivier Ceuppens
NetCom Engineer
GER GI SRS

INTEL Corporation S.A.

http://www.intel.com

 

[commanderbob]

I'm also a fan of winroute Pro. But I have used the others and have had friends use them too.

Winroute Pro is by far the most secure and functional software solution for firewall and proxy set-ups. It is a little odd to start with until you get the loging rules right so you can see what it's dropping, but once this is sorted it's plain sailing.

The problem I've found is that when you come to change the machine it runs on you can't export or copy the filter rules.. this is a big pain when you have 100's of rules.

 

[NilEinne]

Since you posted to this group and you didn't mention what you're looking for, the help her emight be useful. However, I should say that from my experience WinGate is very good if your looking for IMHO adequate securty for the home user (if you set it up right) combined with easy and virtually limitless connection sharing with Windows based computers. The WinGate Winsock Redirector Service is very good. The trouble with NAT of course is that it can be very problematic especially with unstandard protocols. You can partially overcome this my specifically designing something to for the protocol in question or by doing some port forwarding etc. But it's not easy and will take a while for unstandard protocols to be supported. But the Wingate Winsock Redirector Service ensures you can do most things without much set up and Wingate also has options such as NAT, port forwarding etc in cases when it doesn't just work. However, the firewall is not that flash and security will be less.

 

[Morrisson]

You can export the rules, in fact the whole Winroute configuration. You just need to make a copy of the CFG files stored in the main install directory.

After you reinstall, just copy these back in overwriting the (new) existing ones then restart the winroute service. You whole configuration will be back including new services, times, address groups, dhcp settings, the lot.