Agnitum's Outpost Pro

[Vorlin]

Well, it's an unfortunate thing that Sygate for some reason has kept giving me problems even though I've completely repartitioned/rebuilt my machine (two partitions, C&D, C with 10 gb and D with 30gb roughly, windows on C, everything else installed on D). Those lost clusters with the debug and tray logs kept happening even though nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary and once again, I got a canned response from them (although it was much better than ZA's response to my mutex/mail/etc email).

So what I'm going to do is pound the crap out of Agnitum's Outpost and see what we have.
Hopefully I can get a firewall that A: won't cause my machine to crap out at the most inconvenient times, B: won't have glaring holes still in it (shame shame ZA), and C: allows VPN without too much trouble.

[Rewandythal]

I can definitely recommend Tiny personal firewall... I'm using it alongside ZAPro 3 on one machine, on its own on another machine, and it seems far more advanced than ZAPro!

I'll try Outpost as well, and perhaps review it if I have time!

[Vorlin]

Good deal...I've heard a lot about Tiny so I might give that a shot too. I'm really looking forward to possibly making a plugin for Outpost, since you can...because God knows every firewall out there allows for email-filtering but how many actually do filtering for Opera? ZA doesn't, Sygate doesn't...etc etc. *sigh* So that's why Outpost is appealing to me.

[Ouroboros]

I like Outpost...'course I'm a dial-up user...but hey...ZA, Tiny, and Sygate have all frozen my connection in the past...so far so good with AO...Hey Wait!...Agnitum Outpost

Ouroboros

[Vorlin]

Well, here's my initial review of Outpost so far...

Installation
Couldn't be easier. Few clicks of the mouse, and you're in. Usual directory and such are included but you can change those to wherever you want to stuff Outpost. The setup program, of course, restarts your machine so that all things needing reconfiguring at startup for dll's, etc can be done.

Interface
Pretty nice and easy to use interface. Since I just got off the Sygate/ZA Pro 3 bandwagon, I've got to say that's it easier than Sygate (which isn't bad) and a far cry better than ZA Pro's UI just due to the fact that manipulation of screens doesn't require a Master's degree.

Rulesets
This is a good point for Outpost, as far as I've been able to tell, as you can throw an executable into a pre-set rule (such as "Download Manager") or you can customize your own. Keep in mind that if Outpost is in policy-mode 'Block most', you have to specify every ruleset for anything to be allowed out, whereas 'Allow most' will allow anything you have not specifically blocked. Overall, very good.

Extra options
Outpost has some things like DNS caching, ad blocking (based on height/width of banner, html string matching, and something else, pretty nifty), and some other pretty useful tools that help sift the good stuff from the trash that ends up in web pages and whatnot. I'm wondering if the ad-blocking works on the email-filtering and just how much email would make it through unscathed.

Level of security
Outpost has four levels of security. Block most, Allow most, Stop all, and Disabled. I think those are fairly explanatory but for those new to the firewall scene, it's good to know that Stop all is vastly different than Disabled. Example: if I wanted to be the DMZ for a game online but didn't want anything else touching my machine, I'd explicitly allow all transactions by that game's executable (TCP/UDP, both directions, etc) and hit the Stop all option. That way, nothing makes it in or out except the game communications however I'd have to make sure that nothing else (Seti, Trillian, browsers, etc) are open and trying to talk because Windows is notorious for hanging when the internet connection goes **** up (tasks not responding even though they're just timing out). On the other hand, if I wanted the VPN to work for me to be able to get into work's network from home, I'd have to disable the firewall during the time I was connected internally. I think this has something to do with UDP encapsulation between the VPN and the checkpoint software and I'm going to bang on this some more tonight, but I do know that it works if you disable the firewall.

Email filtering
According to an email from Agnitum, they do support email-filtering for both IE and Opera so I'm going to see if that works tonight. If it does, then AO just got a ton of cool points from me, as everything else seems to only go with Outlook Express/etc and I can't stand that.

Programs
Upon initial startup, it throws you into a Programs screen that allows you to add any number of executables to Partially allowed, Trusted, and Blocked sections. Partially allowed sets the ruleset on differing traffic (might allow UDP for DNS but no TCP which in turn might break nslookup) whereas Trusted sets the ruleset for that application to allow all traffic from said application to the internet and vice versa. Partially is better than Trusted unless you really know what you're doing. You don't want to fall into the 'I'm running NAV2001 and I'm safe' trap with your firewall otherwise you might just find out that your box is being used as a Warez pr0n dump zone.

Overall
Very good stuff so far...I'm gonna keep going on it and posting stuff as I see them. No BSODs, no lost chains/clusters, etc etc...very happy so far.

[Rewandythal]

Is this the Pro version or the Free version?

[Vorlin]

This is the pro version. It's a 30 day trial which is normally thirty bucks or so...

[Rewandythal]

Alright.

I've downloaded both, I'll give both the Free and Pro versions a try.

[Vorlin]

Well, I'm a good few days into this review and so far, I'm very impressed. No crashes, no hangs, no lost clusters or chains...everything's working just fine. The only thing I have to do is disable the firewall while I'm on the VPN because of something with the UDP conversations. Maybe I can figure that out because a running firewall with a tunneled VPN conversation would be much better than turning off the damned thing, hehe... Overall though, things are very good. I'm looking into making the email-filtering better through their open-ended plugins.