Symantec scraps Sygate consumer firewall

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Bye bye, SPF! Plus: alternatives...

SPF was a nice alternative but I'm disappointed that they sold it at all (especially to the company that they did). What a nice way to thank those who did buy it. Oh well, maybe they'll survive long enough for people to forget ? and maybe not. Meanwhile, I nabbed the last SPF version before they sold it.

I've nothing against ZoneAlarm, except the incessant ZAP nagging upon EVERY reboot that I experienced when its subscription expired. When I called their tech support and asked how to stop the nagging until I was ready to up my subscription I was advised to uninstall it. Heh! So I did, and in a rage I zapped the unopened box that I'd purchased for another computer too! I hope I've sufficiently uninstalled it now. ZA is ok, but I don't recommend it or ZAP to my customers anymore.

Maybe Outpost Firewall? And they have a free version that's just a little stripped down. The free version of SPF was a little stripped down, too.

On the other hand ? there is this somewhat intimidating but super powerful free solution:
http://www.obfuscation.org/ipf/ipf-howto.txt
It's not Windows based, but the very interesting thing is that it is possible to use it to make a box with IPF that is "IP-less" (it has no IP address and is completely transparent to network traffic and uses 2 NIC's). See section 9.2 at the above link. The box can sit between the modem and the router (yes, you read that correct, on the WAN side of the router!) and do firewalling that keeps the cpu usage way down on all the downstream (LAN side of the router) computer firewalls. I built one, using FreeBSD, and it's a really cool stand alone "first line defense" firewall.

Posted by: Tech Maven   Posted on: 12/02/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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