which firewall for p2p?

[saimike]

hi guys,

can anyone suggest a good firewall for p2p apps, esp BT and emule?

here's the story: i usually use BT and emule on a dell lattitude laptop sitting in the DMZ protected by zonealarm. recently the laptop has gone unresponsive kinda randomly. sometimes i'll doubleclick zonealarm to bring it up and that'll cause the laptop to be unresponsive, sometimes its IE, etc. its gotten so bad i'm afraid to do anything once its up and going with downloads. and the downloads dont seem to be as fast as they were b4 either. i'm also losing my highID on emule -- that never happened before.

at first, i suspected that my isp put is blocking me, but then i'm still getting _some_ throughput so that theory went out the window. i've tried re-installing win2k, but no dice. i tried using the laptop on a network with known good throughput with BT, and still it goes unresponsive at times. i'm beginning to suspect that this is caused by zonealarm.

 

[chilled]

Sygate Personal Firewall Pro works pretty well for me. Doesn't use much RAM, its effective and I get good speeds. I use BT and Overnet a lot as well.

 

[saimike]

thanks i'll give it a shot.

 

[Boscoh]

ZoneAlarm has problems with some p2p apps. I know it didnt like Shareaza or BT on my systems. After a while my system would exhibit the same problems as yours. I think it's a pretty wide issue.

I switched to Kerio and had no more problems.

 

[saimike]

interesting ... funny thing is, up until memorial day, things were fine and dandy -- i was even maxing out my cable bandwidth with BT. and thats with zonealarm loaded! but after memorial day, things went down the shitter ...

btw, has there ever been a comparison done betw personal firewalls? how do they compare?