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What's the best firewall?


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What's the best firewall?  

432 members have voted

  1. 1. What's the best firewall?

    • ZoneAlarm
      54
    • Outpost
      35
    • Sygate
      53
    • Symantec
      17
    • Kerio
      26
    • Windows Firewall
      27


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Someone had inquired about IPSEC above. I have only experimented with this in a lab situation. My impressions are that it's about as rock solid of a secure network implementation as you're going to get for your client/server and server/server communications. There are some caveats however. The setup is a total bear. I mean seriously, this is not for the neophyte network admin. In fact I would say that unless you're one of these people who dream in binary and hex, that you should only attempt it on a large scale if there is more than one person involved in the planning and implementation. There's a lot to consider which means there's a lot to forget somewhere along the way.

Now I have one to throw out there. I've been using Symantec Client Security for several years now. This is primarily due to the AV portion of the client. I've always been very impressed with the performance of that product and my history of having no major outbreaks or infections really speaks for itself. On the other hand, the firewall portion of this client is plain crap. I'm actually struggling at this point to not bang out 10 pages of venom detailing all of the reasons I hate the product and why it has totally destroyed any and all of my confidence in Symantec as a whole. So what I am asking is this: what managed firewall based product would get your recommendation based on actual experience with that product. I have had so many issues with the Symantec product that I actually don't install the firewall at all. You can only take so many episodes of someone screaming on the other end of the phone at you. So I would actually say that the ease of management and the reliability of the product is what's most important to me. If it's the greatest most secure firewall on earth, but it's such a chore to manage and riddled with bugs that commonly prevent legitimate communications to go through, then it's actually more unsecure because, like in my case, you'll never actually use it.

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One post said Windows Firewall rocks...I dont know enuf about it so someone care to enlighten me why it rocks? I voted for zone alarm...didnt know about the other contender sygate. Will check it out if I ever need it.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
Look 'n' stop is one of the best firewalls and according to FirewallLeakTester.com, is one of the most secure against leaks. The thing is it is really hard to configure for newbies [Enhanced rules set] and may not work with certain programs and may need certain patches LnS Rules.

I don't know how much I trust that site. It says that Sygate doesn't have Application Monitoring, when it does. The first time a new program tries to access the network/internet, Sygate will tell you exactly what program it is.

I'm gonna download all the programs and test them out tonight for myself. :)

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outpost is the only good one. i prefered sygate b/c of several features, but its not really improved... look n stop should be great, but the configuration somehow sux...

http://www.firewallleaktester.com/tests.htm

Look 'n' stop is one of the best firewalls and according to FirewallLeakTester.com, is one of the most secure against leaks. The thing is it is really hard to configure for newbies [Enhanced rules set] and may not work with certain programs and may need certain patches LnS Rules.

Well... I can say with 100% confidence that I'm not going to use Look'n'Stop. I uninstalled Sygate on my computer, and then installed the Look'n'Stop trial. I downloaded all the tools from the Firewall Leak Tester and when I ran Test 1 of Wallbreaker, guess what happens?

Blue Screen of Death!

It's the very first one that I've got on this computer in over a year, so don't tell me I have problems with my installation. The BSOD also reffered to a Look'n'Stop system file (lnsdw.sys ?), so I knew that it was the culprit.

Not to mention that after having used it for a while, and allowing all my main programs (Outlook, MSN, Winamp, Explorer for file sharing), it failed most of the tests anyways!

If a firewall is going to crash my machine, it can go out the window (haha, get it?) for all I care. I've never had another firewall cause a problem like this (except for trying to install PC-Cillin on a Win2003 machine... :whistle:).

My vote = :thumbdown

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I'm quite fond of the firewall included with V-COM's SystemSuite, which is based on Sygate. I'm not happy at all about Symantec buying them out, as it seems Symantec products have become so bloated as to be almost unusable in recent years.

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Do you really need a firewall if you are behind a router?

Depends on how paranoid you are. I always recommend one regardless of the router, because of forwarded ports or *shudders* UPnP.

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