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Anyone know of a free firewall for MS OSs'?

Heh, the anti-Zonealarm whiners should be arriving any minute now. 🙂

In all fairness, two things I don't like about ZA is that the uninstall is known to be faulty and their 1-year subscription sucks IMO.
 
XP has one built into the OS.

Not exactly full featured, but it's better than nothing.
 
Originally posted by: vi_edit
XP has one built into the OS.

Not exactly full featured, but it's better than nothing.
Click to expand...

Don't use XP...2000pro.


Thanks guys^^^ zonealarm... I'm using a very old version of Tiny Personal Firewall now 2.1 something when it was free...


 
Originally posted by: Zebo
Originally posted by: Ameesh
Just get a NAT
Click to expand...

Always good to hear from the MS pro🙂... Whats NAT?
Click to expand...

a network address translator, it basically hides your network behind one ip address and only computers connecting to a machine first will open a hole for traffic to come through otherwise most malicious traffic is stopped because the traffic is coming from the WAN to the LAN and no port mapping exsists in the NAT Table..

if you really need stateful packet filtering then get a firewall but i seriously dont think you do (as most people dont) in fact they usually just cause more headaches for administration.

niether a NAT nor a firewall garuntee security, only poper setup and vigilinace will get you close to that goal.


PS: i personally just use a NAT at home, i have 15 computers at home and we were not hit with slammer or blaster or whatever umpteen other crappy viruses/worms that have been released in the last couple of years.


oh and if its not clear from the link above me, a consumer NAT functions as a router in the consumer case and is very easy to setup and cheap. I have a linksys one that cost me about $40.
 
I'm using a router on a cable modem. No software firewall and XP's firewall turned off.

I've never had a problem.
 
The T in NAT stands for translation; it's a feature, not a device.

The $40 device you purchase, most commonly branded by Linksys, D-Link, Netgear or MS is usually called a router or residential gateway. All of them do NAT, whereas a simple hub or switch does not. Also not to be confused with Cisco routers.

I'm not being pedantic, but rather making things clear for 98% of users out there, including ATOT geeks. When we say firewall, we don't mean Checkpoint stateful packet inspection and complex rule-sets, but rather simple consumer software or the aforementioned SOHO "router".

IIRC, Windows' firewall does not do NAT, but Windows ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) does. ICS is a fairly basic tool bundled with consumer Windows, but it sorta gets the job done. 😉
 
Try to find the free, old version of Tiny Personal Firewall. It's totally capable and extremely configurable.

Excellent piece of software, I use it on my server/workybox type systems. (no firewall on main workstation)
 
I think Tiny Personal Firewall (or at least, some portion of it) got spun off into Kerio Personal Firewall. It happened somewhere arounf verion 2.1.4 and 2.1.5. I've had problems getting Tiny 2.1.x to work on XP, but Kerio has been just fine. Both are a good 18 months old now though.

-SUO
 
I agree with Ameesh you can use a consumer router as a hardware firewall, best of all they're cheap.

I've seen routers $9.99 - $39.99.
 
Originally posted by: RossMAN
I agree with Ameesh you can use a consumer router as a hardware firewall, best of all they're cheap.

I've seen routers $9.99 - $39.99.
Click to expand...

I'm sure *YOU* have😛

Seriously I have a lynksys just need to RTFM a little.
 
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