Whats the best firewall?

[BigEm]

I have heard of some good ones but does anyone recommend one over the other? Why?

Zonealarm
McAfee
Comando
Windows Firewall
Avg

[fraggle]

all you need is to protect your ports you're most using ( lets say, ftp, port 21 ).
therefore the windows firewall is good enough. ( if you want to know how it
works, then take a look at here : http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/security/internet/sp2_wfintro.mspx ).
i guess you're surfin via home-desktop-system, therefore you won't need that
amount of security like in an it-security business. if you have a router, then they
have mostly a firewall integrated with spi ( stateful packet inspection - is a
dynamically packet-filtering-technique, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateful_firewall ).
and this is how it works :



check your handbook for your router or search the web for more information about
your routers firewall/security configurations.

[jimmy97]

My brother uses only the windows firewall. Fraggle what ports does he need to protect? I think he uses XP home edition SP2 with only a modem. Thanks Fraggle.

all you need is to protect your ports you're most using ( lets say, ftp, port 21 ).
therefore the windows firewall is good enough.

[fraggle]

i think he runs no services on his computer, according to that, he has not to cover a specific port,
only the ports which were concerned from the in- & outgoing traffic, should be filtered ( as I mentioned ).

I stumbled over this, It is maybe interesting : http://lifehacker.com/5061933/five-best-windows-firewalls

[Adam]

ZoneAlarm also works good.

[tomron]

You can test your FW

https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

[tomron]

@Dead Land Estate

I used Sygate years ago and was pleased with it but I thought it wasn't supported anymore.

[cluetrain]

I checked to see if anyone had posted about this but among these utility programs at Nirsoft there's one call CurrPorts that lets you View Opened TCP/IP ports / connections in Windows. It has helped me a lot at work. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html Good collection of utils.

[swytch]

@cluetrain-

Thank you, thank you.  I'll have to check those utils out.


Swytch~~ 

[cluetrain]

I was using that program that I posted about that's part of the systools called "current ports" and as soon as Windows appeared I started it so as soon as it opens I could at least see the rest of what I'm connecting to before Windows is even all the way up. It was interesting a Microsoft server appears and disappears 65.54.95.79 never to be seen again. It tells you everything (local and remote) process name, process ID, local port, local port name, state, process, product name, file version, company, creation time, process services & attributes, remote IP... drag/copy whatever you want and write it to an html file. There's more options plus you can kill TCP connections and close processes from within it. Sorry I was mostly talking to myself I couldn't contain my fledgling enthusiasm. -ct