poll::run two firewalls?

[Fatphantom]

i also have a couple of av's
as well as spybot,adaware, and cwshredder.
i beleive untill i have problems i feel secure.

You can have as many as AVs you want, but only have ONE running in the background.

Rather than buying a AV product from a company, why not search there website too see if they have a free online scanner?

Online scanners-
Trend Micro (housecall):
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Trojan scan:
http://trojanscan.com/

BitDefender:
http://www.bitdefender.com/scan/licence.php

Panda Activescan:
http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/

There are alot more.

[nihil]

Not a good idea on the same box IMHO.

McAfee, Norton, Agnitum and PCCillin certainly don't like it and tell you so!

Black Ice, ZoneAlarm and Port Monster don't seem to mind (or is it "care" )

I think that it is OK to look at specialist "firewalls" or "sandboxes" for e-mail and P2P applications, as these may not be covered by your firewall, particularly the free ones.

Two AVs are a good idea IMHO, but DON'T run two interactive scanners at once. I go for one from the Eastern Hemisphere and one from the West as they tend to find different things at any one time, and this partly addresses time zone delays.

A trojan scanner does not seem to interfere with firewalls, because it operates behind them. You do get conflicts with AVs though. For example AVG will tend to let Trojans through, but as soon as Moosoft's, "The Cleaner" detects it......so does AVG (sometimes) and you now have two apps trying to deal with the same problem

Two good tools that don't seem to conflict with anything..........presumably because they are detecting the actual infection process are:

Registry Prot:

http://www.diamondcs.com.au

and WinPatrol:

http://www.winpatrol.com

Good luck

[CYB3RJ3DI]

Thank you for the advice, i will look into that further and you are right...
i was running spybot and adaware at the same time to save some time
and crashed the system....that blew!!

i will normally run a full system scan before going online and then defrag and connect.
**thought i was going to save some time and it kicked my ass**

thx again for the advice!!

[SirDice]

Having 2 different brands of firewall is a common practice in the banking world. Usually they're combined with some kind of 'reverse' proxy.

You enter the network through firewall A and your connection gets terminated on the proxy (placed inside the DMZ of Firewall A). After the proxy scans/strips/cleans the request it will forward the connection to the 'real' webserver. This webserver is on a DMZ of firewall B.

This setup is highly secure but can be quite difficult to maintain. Especially if there are many websites, all with different security specs.