treat2

OPPS! This was meant to be in the other Poll, on Firewalls. Soz. If anyone cares, move the above post to the Firewall Poll, and delete this one. Soz yawls.

Not surprising this one has been going since Mar 18 2004, 11:22 AM. It'll keep going until someone does ONE (AND MORE) OF the following THREE THINGS... 1) Not all Firewalls offer the same things, obviously. HOWEVER, when speaking of what they offer, "Out-Of-The-Box", meaning, as delivered AND THE INITIAL SETTINGS.... I know of NO firewall Vendor that even comes close to providing the protection from specific well known Ports that are MISUSED by incoming and/or outgoing, and/or "in-out" messages. There's a sizable list of Ports EVEN WHEN SPEAKING ABOUT those Ports ABOVE 1023, that should be closed, in A VARIETY of directions. Add to that, the Ports below 1023, and you end up with a list of commonly misused Ports that should be closed (by default). Yet NOT ONE VENDOR provides ANYTHING but a tiny fraction (or none) of the Ports that should be closed, as being ALREADY SETUP "Out-of-the-box". 2) I know of NO Firewall Vendor that provides ANYTHING LIKE GENERALIZED PROFILES, as Microsoft does (for example), as it applies to generalting specific Security Profiles that are PREDEFINED by them, and serve as reasonable starting points for a variety of specific types of users and uses. For example, use as a Server, or use by the DOD on a stand-alone PC, and about a half-dozen more predefined profiles. All of which COULD BE CREATED AND DISTRIBUTED WITH THE OUT OF THE BOX Firewall, BUT NEVER is distributed, NOR EVER EVEN PROVIDED, if asked for. For Example... try asking Check Point, which distributes Zone Alarm for a few WELL TESTED XML SYSTEM Rules, Program Rules for STANDARD EXE's in System32!!! NOTE that they ASK YOU! tHEY ACTUALLY BUILD IT INTO ZONE ALARM, FOR THEM TO RECIEVE your own settings. Is anyone going to even believe that no such profiles could NOT be constructed! Absurd! Such Profiles would include Predefined Rules for Very well distributed Apps, that could be selected, as a choice after the Firewall finds that program is installed, such as MS Outlook, or Frontpage, Word, and hundreds more programs. NO VENDER supplies the number of rules that should be supplied for any kind of user, within any kind of configuration, or the typical Services such as SvcHost, and a vast number of Applications as well. 3) Someone with plenty of bucks Creates a complex Program for the Various Firewalls, that would understand how to create these rules, and where to put them to be integrated into THE VENDOR'S OWN PRODUCT, which you select, or it could search for and detect. And, that new company keeps regular tabs on new Ports being exploited, as new apps are built with less than adequate security which use new Ports. In sum, ALL FIREWALLS are delivered to EVERYONE with entirely worthless settings which do only the most basic things, and can be generally concluded as providing NO MEANINGFUL FIREWALL Protection to ANYONE. UNTIL Such Profiles and progarmming is written, well-tested by Vendors, and suopplied to consumers, ALL FIREWALLS ARE essentially meaningless, as supplied. REMEMBER.... It is NOT in a Firewall Vendor's BEST INTERESTS to GIVE YOU WHAT YOU REALLY NEED!!!!! Uncustomized Firewalls are garbage, and the Firewall Vendor's approach is to keep them that way, and keep you dumb and unaware of what is REALLY going on unless you're a Port and Firewall junkie who ACTUALLY KNOWS what they are talking about.... which is about 0.0000001% of the people that claim ANY FIREWALL is OH SO GREAT!!!

Did Norton Install the new Ghost Service, and did you see GhostTray.exe on the taskbar actually not have an "X" through it??? Here's the "skinny on Symantec Products... I've been buying them since 2000. Both Norton AntiVirus and Firewall, a.k.a. "Internet Firewall Security Professional Version 2000", then 2001 through 2004, my subscription has not yet expired BUT I have no intention of purchasing the Upgrade (2005) (my subscription expires at towards the end of the year, nice, eh?) NOW, I have bought Norton Ghost V9.0 and spent AT LEAST 300 hours attempting to get it to work, and I've finally found the answer to all the Ghost problems you and others have been reporting... Take the Norton CD, put it under the front tire of a heavy truck, and forget about it. It's complete garbage! I actually owned PowerQuest's Drive Image and Partition Image (names might be slightly different, the boxes are upstairs, & it ain't important.) Symantec bought these products from PowerQuest and stuck it into Ghost 9. Hence the "PQ" letters that start so many file names. Let's just say that Norton's Firewall is worse than free firewalls. I've not seen the Version for 2005, but I guarantee you (because of updates I recieve), that Symantec still does NOT give users the capability of transfering the Firewall Settings, and there are more bugs in the Firewall than any previous version I've seen. ALL OF which is to make a single point.... Symantec KNOWS that EVERYONE has a problem with Ghost 9, JUST AS THEY KNOW that their firewall has plenty of bugs, as does the "LiveUpdate" product that requires the most idiotic thing a Firewall Vendor would have their cusstomers do... nameley signon to the Net as a member of the Admin group, running both COM+ Services, and particularly DCOM, not to mention a number of other services that leave your PC wide open to being randomly selected for attack. THAT'S been the same since 2000, and DESPITE using DCOM, as the means of communication for LiveUpdate (which is in itself, a REALLY stupid idea), THEY HAVE NEVER changed that, BUT HAVE PROPOGATED IT, into all their products! If ANYONE knows anything about Windows Programming, as a 25 year veteran in DP, with 11 of those years spent doing just Windows, they'd NEVER use COM+, DCOM, or ANY of that garbage. Aside from being garbage, COM. COM+, and in particular (as mentioned before) DCOM, all leave a hole as wide as the Grand Canyon in your Firewall whenever your run LiveUpdate. It doesn't matter what product you run it from. BTW. Anyone notice that in AT LEAST the PAST 9 months, Symantec has not come up with A SINGLE UPDATE for ANY of the bugs in Ghost 9, to even bother making the product actually usable??? It's the way they operate. Same thing with their Firewall, etc. There are so many installation and post-installation product bugs in Norton Ghost 9, you can bank on the fact that it never went through Q&A (Quality Assurance Testing, before release). If they even claimed it did, their entire 1 person Q&A Group must have been eating paint chips since childhood. Forget Ghost 9. Trash it. Burn it, or just stomp on it. The product will never work correctly in any machine. (It might work on a Windows Version that's undergone almost no changes, or doesn't use NTFS, but I seriously doubt it.) ANYONE TRY GOOGLING FOR: "RTC file is missing" or "Error E9290006"??? I find it rather interesting that a single product keeps coming up, namely a Registration Database fixer-upper thing. Either they just happened to have found a good thing that several thousand people have seen by now, or they just got real lucky. I doubt the latter of the two. Just one fool's opinion that the RTC File being sought either DOES NOT EXIST, and if it does, Ghost has no idea where it is. Expanding the Path to include the 2 directories in Ghost that have RTC files wound help either. And WHAT I REALLY LOVE THE MOST about Ghost is that EVERY SOLUTION in the Symantect "Knoweledge Base" has you "uninstalling" Ghost. JUST ONE ITTY BITTY PROBLEM.... THEY PROGRAMMED THE INSTALLATION PROGRAM AND MSI File with NO flags, and to ignore uninstall from a right click if even tried off of CD, after you fail to uninstall it from the "Change and Remove Programs" facility. NOPE... Symantec wants you the walk the ENTIRE REGISTRATION DATABASE, seaching for all occurances of "Ghost", and "PQ", leaving a few files you can still delete out of System32 if you read the readme file. It just takes about and hour or so to "uninstall". What fun, and I'm REALLY SKILLED AT IT, by now! Maybe someone will pay me to do it, eh? Sure. Symantec's Q&A is none existant now. Their "Knowledge Base" on Ghost 9 would be more approptiately called a "We Haven't Got a Clue Base". 5 years of their Firewall is enough. Reinstalling the **** thing takes me 3 weeks to get all my settings exactly like they previously were setup, since HUNDREDS OF SCREEENS have to be either printed or stored in a hierarchally organized group of folders, and well named files, in order to reproduce a HIGHLY CUSTOMIZED Firewall that I've made during the past 5 Years. At this point, with 3 PC's. There is NO WAY IN HELL that I would keep using their Firewall, and following tradition, there is no way I could use their product either, even though I can boot from their recovery disk. Big deal, eh? HERE'S AN ALTERNATIVE TO GHOST ..... check out: http://www.liutilities.com which has a free download trial, of what I am hoping will be a product that doesn't just back up System Stuff, but can back up entire Logical Partitions with their MBR's and FATs, etc. I have not yet installed the download, so I've no idea if the thing will do a REAL disk recovery, but everything on their Site is written to claim that they can backup image files and clone disks, and have a recovery disk. Try Downloading the Professional Version, from what I read during an hour or more of perusing their site, indicates that it includes things that would make the Standard Version of their product a real pain in the ... And LOOK ELSEWHERE FOR better prices. I SAW a comparison of existing prices on the Standard edition at another site, and it was WELL BELOW what the Vendor will charge you, if you by their product from them. And Please don't use your Credit Card on the Net. It ain't ready for that sort of thing. Wait a few decades, for that to happen. RAG, RAG, RAG on Symantect. after 300 hrs working on Ghost 9, and realizing it will never work, I'm just putting out to the public the kind of garbage that company does as a matter of protocol. http://www.liutilities.com/products/trial/ Makes Win Backup V2 Pro. I downloaded.