"(e-mail address removed)" said in
You may want to consider getting a 3rd party firewall
instead of the windows firewall. WHy? Because windows
firewallonly stops INCOMING traffic. It does nothing to
monitor orblock any outgoing. Outgoing like worms,
trojans, spyware,viruses you already have or download
(purposefully yetunknowingly). By getting a thrid party
firewall you can not only monitor and block incoming but
also outgoing. You can also set up specific rules for
programs. A free and popular firewall is Zonealarm. Or
you can spend money and get a package like Nortons
Internet Security that has a firewall, antivirus, popup
blocker and more.
I have Norton's firewall (part of their Internet and Security product). Now
that they decided to use a common client application to share between it and
their anti-virus product, it goes brain dead all too often (which, to me, is
about once every day or two). From Symantec I got a list of commands to use
in a .bat file to fully unload and stop their processes and then restart
them to kick NIS in the butt:
To stop NIS:
pskill.exe ccApp.exe
net stop "Symantec Proxy Service"
net stop "Symantec Event Manager"
To restart NIS:
start "Symantec Common Client" /b "C:\Program Files\Common
Files\Symantec Shared\ccApp.exe"
net start "Symantec Event Manager"
net start "Symantec Proxy Service"
pskill is a utility from SysInternals so I can kill a process by a [partial]
name rather than figure out what is its PID (process identifier) in Task
Manager. If disabling NIS doesn't get the Internet connection working
(which only means reenabling it will kill the connection again), and to
eliminate having to reboot everytime NIS's ccApp.exe or ccPxySvc.exe
services go brain dead, I use the above to stop and start NIS. If disabling
NIS doesn't work, sometimes this works but not always in which case I'm
forced to reboot. That's why I suspect Symantec didn't divulge to me
everything to completely stop, unload, and reset NIS so it could be start
anew just like when you bootup.
Disabling NIS from loading and using the trick of adding a shortcut to it in
the Startup group has never worked to resolve any problems encountered with
NIS (this was a Windows 95/98 trick, anyway). Because NIS seems to go brain
dead eventually, and after 3 years of using it, I'm finally going to look
elsewhere for another firewall. Maybe Sygate's personal firewall or Kerio
will do better. It's not that I lost the Internet connection, it's not that
the cable modem didn't resync to the ISP after the IP lease expired, it's
not the router, but it's NIS going brain dead.
