Firewall

^whitey^

Before I start I hope i'm posting in the right place...
I need advice on what firewall program to choose for my 56k connection i'm already using Norton Antivirus 2002.

Thanks in advance

tom-thebox

Nortan security is pretty sharp, plus you can make your own policys and a nice little ruleset.

Blackice is pretty good along with Conseal firewall.

Do a search on www.tucows.com for the trial versions to try them out.

Anoter choice if you want to spend time at it snort www.snort.org.

Regards

ecksor

Bearing in mind that snort isn't a firewall of course.

tom-thebox

Originally posted by ecksor
Bearing in mind that snort isn't a firewall of course.

No but its a hell of a packet sniffer with a good rule set just the thing for intrusion detection.

Chad ghostal

zonelabs do a good free firewall, simple easy to use etc etc..
all youd need for a home connection. .

logistic

The only thing with zone alarm is that is slows your connection, im not exactly to sure what kind off effect this will be on a 56 k.
Is it realy worth it even if u have norton 2000?

drjolt

If you want more power & control than zonealarm, take a look at Tiny Personal Firewall v4.5, which in addition to packet filtering seems to have added systrace-ish system call control functionality along with an IDS module which uses snort rulesets. Unfortunately it's no longer free for individual use, cost is $39. www.tinysoftware.com

I may even fork out myself.

^whitey^

Thanks for the info lads. I think i'll go with zone alarm and let ye know what i think of it.:)

Cheers

Typedef

Get a 486 and install something like IPCop linux.

Simple, free, secure and you get a Unix box to play with for fun or profit.

"Breeze drifting on by, you know how I feel.
It's a new dawn it's a new day, it's a new life for me yeah".

drjolt

Just once I'd like to see a discussion on firewalling at home where the proverbial old 486 doesn't get trotted out.

BTW the old free tiny personal firewall 2.x seems to still exist, under the kerio brand http://www.kerio.com/us/kpf_overview.html

^whitey^

Can someone tell me more or leave a url as to where i can learn about the 486 running linux does it act as a hardware firewall or wha?

ecksor

Um, not sure how to answer that question.

Anyway, it would essentially be the gateway on your home lan, configured to dial up to your ISP and do packet filtering using iptables (or whatever Linux uses nowadays). Such a setup would typically be well hardened (the phrase you're looking for there is "bastion host") and configured to do NAT (or on linux they call it "Masquerading"). Can't refer you to an article, but searching for the above terms and phrases will probably dig some stuff up for you.

If you are used to unix like operating systems, then OpenBSD is probably better suited to this job. A rough generalisation I would tend to make about such configurations is that the more user-friendly ones tend to take a lot more work to setup properly for this sort of thing unfortunately.

For a standalone windows box I'd probably go with the solutions that DrJolt posted, unless you have spare hardware and feel like experimenting and aren't in a hurry.

(If you do go down this route, feel free to post questions on this forum. A few threads about securing home setups wouldn't do any harm).

ainiseoir

The fun starts when your Norton Anti Virus and Zone Alarm cross swords over the protection of your e-mail.
Both suggest turning off a vital feature of the other's software.
As both are excellent programs, pity to have to mess with them.
If you get a rush of blood and buy Zone Alarm Pro, bypass the bundle with Anonymizer added. they haven't got it right yet and it will do your head in.

Typedef

Just once I'd like to see a discussion on firewalling at home where the proverbial old 486 doesn't get trotted out.

Personally, I use a 386dx with 16mb of ram and a 80mb hard disk, running Slackware 8.0, Linux 2.4.19 and iptables, but, for most people, that's just not feasable, much like the purchase of commercial software and running of the same on an inherintly insecure OS ™ like windows.

Aside from that is the very valid point that most people can't afford or simply have better sense then to pay €500 on a hardware firewall solution when a free and better solution is available in Linux.

I don't think it's tedious to point out an extremely secure low cost firewalling paradigm in Linux, as opposed to the insecure, bloatware paradigm in Microsoftopian software solution land.

ecksor

It is very tedious.