John Coutts pounced upon this pigeonhole and pronounced:
Is there another free firewall other than Zone Alarm (really slows down my 2
System network) or Tiny which I read expires after 30 days? I need free
for personal use reccomondations...Thanks all!! DF
*************** REPLY SEPARATER [sic] *****************
Use a dedicated NAT router such as the Netgear RT311. I just bought 4 of them
on eBay for $25.00 each. Don't mess around with firewall software as it is
notoriously unreliable.
..but does trap unwanted *outbound* calls that you may not know about.
Do of course use the router to block *inbound* probing.
*************** REPLY SEPARATER ****************
You are totally in control of what your machine outputs by controlling what
programs and services you have running. What you can't control is access
attempts from the outside through such services as NetBios. A NAT router allows
you to use those services internally but blocks them from the outside world.
Software that blocks outbound access is virtually useless to the novice user,
and is a potential problem source. The firewall software pops up with a message
asking the user if he/she wants to allow that access. The novice doesn't have a
clue what the message is about, so he/she goes ahead and the spyware that they
just loaded from their kids CD starts to report back to the mother ship. The
biggest problem is the unknown ports that are opened for listening in such
programs as KazaA. Moving control of that to a dedicated piece of hardware
removes the temptation to allow access, as it generally requires a little more
skill and knowledge to program the router.
Of course if you are silly enough to route all ports through to a specific
machine, then the router becomes totally useless as a firewall. There is no
substitute for good sound practice and common sense.
