any good FREE IDS avaliable for windows platform?

[Woomera]

is there? all of them are not free and free ones are for unix.

[RogueSpear]

There is a Windows version of Snort. It'll take a little reading up on and getting used to, but it's pretty much the benchmark for open source IDS.

[tain]

Has anyone tried Blink or Strata Guard?

This page lists more stuff, but I haven't tried them.

[RogueSpear]

I've only taken a cursory look at Blink, but as a former user of both Iris and Retina I was a bit hesitant. I've never been too crazy about eEye's products, but not for any lack of features or stability. Probably just personal preference. I could never really "get comfortable" with their stuff. They ain't too cheap either.

That's a funny thing I've noticed in the networking software field. Title's are either open source and free or they're unthinkably expensive like Fluke and Sniffer. The only non-free stuff that's reasonable that I use are DameWare NT Utilities and SolarWinds EE.