Zonealarm and Home Networks

Just thought I'd share a recent experience helping a friend out with his home network. This guy had ADSL installed for a home network with two PCs connected via an ADSL router modem (with a built-in firewall). Everything worked fine. He then started complaining that every morning none of the computers were able to access the internet without restarting. I suggested simply switching the PCs off overnight, but he preferred to leave them on. He then tried changing ADSL routers but still had the same problem. I concluded that the ISP must be disconnecting after a period of inactivity until I noticed he was running Zonealarm, and asked him to disable it. That solved the problem, but I thought I'd share it in case anyone has similar problems.

yeah zonealarm has sometimes weird] things in it :lol:
but it is a great product so far in terms of personal security within the internet realm. aside from turning it off, you could also set the domains, ip addresses, etc. and create certain rules that fit your preference. you could try an opening services that you would be using and then deny all.

Do you have any idea what Zonealarm was doing to cause the problem?
On the same subject (sort of), I've installed a few BT ADSLs where the ADSL modem/router/firewall supplied was the "BT Intelligent Gateway", a product actually made by 2-Wire. This has a built-in 4-port Ethernet switch and sometimes wireless as well. It goes a little beyond the normal in that it maintains an internal table of machines connected, and if you have a separate software firewall on the machines it interferes with that. In the setup instructions they clearly tell you to disable software firewalls before installation

To carry on from The Bishop's post.

I've found that once you have installed the 2wire router et al on the "base" PC. If you then install ZoneAlarm it seems to work ok (in my case anyway, touch wood :!: ).

It will, until you want to change the setup in your 2-Wire, for example to direct incoming port(s) to a particualr machine, then it will barf because it can't see which machines it has connected

Not had that problem (yet :shock: )