deano

Who's the daddy when it comes to firewalls?

I just found out the hard way that I need one Any recommendations?

Corgi

Sygate Personal Firewall Pro, i find, is the best

Zone Alarm and Norton are poo

chiark

Got a spare PC? Like a Pentium 90?

Try ipcop (http://www.ipcop.org), or smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org)

I'll let you know what ipcop's like when I've used it more - finally got around to installing it last night.

ChrisB

I wouldn't say ZoneAlarm is poo - anything is better than nothing!

Chris L

Chris is right - anything is better than nothing. I've used a lot over the years, both personally and professionally (IT Security is my area of work) - Checkpoint, Sonicwall, Netscreen, CiscoPIX, ZoneAlarm, Sygate, McAfee etc etc the list goes on.

For home use, I've found Sygate to be one of the better programs. My preference for this over ZoneAlarm is that it is a smaller and better written app, that takes up less resource on my PC. Both products are effective as firewalls though. The free version of Sygate is perfectly good. The pro version (about $40) gives you some extra features and security options that you may find useful once you are happy with the product. My advice would be to download the free home version and go from there.

Chris

[Edited by Chris L - 8/13/2003 8:45:05 AM]

Jeff Wiltshire

The important thing to remember is that the best (or worse) firewall in the world is only as good as the person(s) who configured the rules....