personal firewall

I'm baaaaack.

And what a nice subject to jump into - right Sahirh?

Zonealarm - Sahirh knows my opinion on personal firewalls.

I just tried using Zonealarm just recently and found a few problems that drove me crazy.

I myself tried to use it to figure out what my W2K machine was doing as it seemed to be sending out some random packets and talking to my Mac for no apparent reason - but that is a story for another day.

While running ZA on my machine I found that my email (Eudora) started to act up. I was sending myself an email from my Mac with a small Word document as an attachment (no scripts). Been doing this for years with no problems.

What happened was it refused to send the word document, but put it in the document as text. Here is what I actually got (most of it):

[code:1]
Content-Type: multipart/appledouble; name="CommunitiesCover.doc" X-Mac-Creator="4d535744"; X-Mac-Type="5738424e";
boundary="ad_481699887_984739_boundary"


Content-Type: application/applefile; name="CommunitiesCover.doc";
X-Mac-Creator="4d535744"; X-Mac-Type="5738424e"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64AAAAegAAABQAAAACAAAAjgAAAR69SquQvUqrkIAAAACAAAAAVzhCTk1TV0QAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABDb21tdW5pdGllc0NvdmVyLmRvYwAAAQAAAAEAAAAAAAAAAB4AAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEAAAABAAAAAAAAAAAeU09SVAA6AIAAHAAe//8=
--ad_481699887_984739_boundary
Content-Type: application/msword; name="CommunitiesCover.doc"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base640M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAOgAAAAAA
AAAAEAAAPAAAAAEAAAD+////AAAAADkAAAD/////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
[/code:1]

I then tried to turn off zonealarm, and my Eudora could not connect to the email server. Turn it back on and it could.

I finally just removed it and everything worked fine.

When I looked at reviews of the project, I found that many people loved the product and many hated it (same as most software products).

I prefer hardware firewalls (as Sahirh knows) but do think that software firewalls have their place - as in my case - to try to track down what is leaving my machine.

But when you can't just turn it off (in my case - it prevented my email program from working), there is definately a problem.

IMHO

What a pleasant surprise ! Nice to have you back mate,

but ZA still rocks

however I'm really impressed with the CyberGuard LX hardware box...


Cheers,

Hardware?????

Hardware????

Did I hear you say hardware? :lol:

Hi

It's been long time.

Windows + Software Firewall = www.phrack.org/show.php?p=62&a=13

Regards
- Cheetah

Yeah thats a good phrack article.. however I don't see that 90% of the people would be able to implement a similar attack.. that said, hardware firewalls are not more secure just because they run on dedicated boxes... they're still just computers running software.

the good personal firewall is located at code project .com
this firewall is for windows
u can place your own rules of firewall with just one click
type "source code for windows firewall "
in google search
u can get the souce code or else u can download the application