ZoneAlarm vs. Sygate

[scratchONtheBOX]

I have been using sygate personal firewall for a few years now and it run fine except sometime some files will get corrupted and have to use scandisk to fix the problem or reinstall the program. The interface is simple (my opinion) compared to ZA where you have to click here and there to access the correct function. So I can quickly configure Sygate. On the other note, I see almost all malware that will disable security application will surely disable ZA since it is so popular....

Thanks for the feedback Falcon21.

However, ZA’s interface is not that bad at all, configuration is easy like I said while ago (well, in my opinion as well).

About the popularity idea, I guess you have a point.

Yo!

[GandalfTheGray]

I have been using ZA, both the free version and ZA Pro, for a number of years on WIN 98SE, W2K, XP Home and XP Pro, probably on a total of 15-20 machines. I have never had one minute's trouble with it and have never identified a true incompatability. If I used it like a turnkey system, it worked fine. If I tried to apply some more challenging requirements, it worked ok, but made the flexibility of a hardware firewall attractive. I have tried Sygate as well. Had a similar experience in a limited evaluation, but I saw no compelling reason to change. I guess I'm not adding much real information to the discussion, but it seemed to me that ZA was getting banged around a little without anyone saying they had been successful with it.

[scratchONtheBOX]

I've tried sygate personal firewall again, with a different BoX config (FRESH INSTALL), a WinXP Pro SP1 (PIII, 256 Ram) and the following is the observations I made:

1. No errors on installation and startup.
2. Still it is very very slow. No other FW is present or enabled. (Any other comments?)

I guess I'm QUITTING sygate.

Still HAPPY with ZA.

Yo!

[shakeshuck]

I tried to set up an Me box as an internet gateway and ZA wouldn't work for me. As soon as internet sharing was turned on at the FW, it tried routing everything via a non-connected dial-up modem instead of a USB DSL modem. Turning it off routed all as expected.

My own complaint with Sygate (and Kerio for that matter) is that not all requests are logged (or at least not by default, and I don't know how to turn them on). I have had a few problems when I have known the firewall is stopping a request, but I haven't known why, where, and how to change it.

I still choose to use Sygate, however.

[dogman]

"Even after many years, the (free) ZoneAlarm personal firewall from Zone Labs is the only personal firewall to "adaptively" stealth port 113. Unlike any other firewall or NAT router (any of which could also do the same) this allows port 113 to be stealthed to any passing Internet scanners or probes, but "unstealthed" for any valid IDENT connection attempts originating from remote servers with which the user's computer is attempting to connect. (Since this could easily be done by any personal firewall or even NAT routers, I am hopeful that this feature might yet appear in other products.)

"Adaptive Stealthing" means that when a TCP SYN packet arrives to request a connection to your machine's port 113, ZoneAlarm checks, on the fly, to see whether your machine currently has any sort of "relationship" with the remote machine (such as a pending outgoing connection attempt). If so, the remote machine is considered to be "friendly" and its IDENT request packet is allowed to pass through ZoneAlarm's firewall. But if the IDENT originating machine is not known to ZoneAlarm as a "friendly" machine, the connection requesting packet is dropped and discarded, rendering port 113 stealth to all unknown port scanners. It's very slick. "


ZA...those guys really know there stuff!

[Egaladeist]

Hi dogman,

Man...what's with you today...you keep posting in old threads...did you just get a job with Zone Alarm? This is the second ZA thread you've dragged out.

Eg

[Relyt]

It's unfortunate, but with all that gibberish about stealthing, looks like he's sleeping with grc as well.

Zone Alarm is still the only personal firewall to offer this sort of adaptive dynamic IDENT port handling.

Source

Anybody can cut and paste, he should at least write his own product review!

~cheers~

[catch]

Although this is an old thread... something stood out to me:

I had been aware of having more two (2) or more application installed for the same purpose give some uncertain errors in a box but in some instance it is working well.

I see this type of logic frequently... "No errors, must be working well." sadly, this logic is very flawed.

Whenever you have multiple, unmapped subjects handling the same objects, especially in a redundant manner something can never be said to be "working well", something along the lines of "No errors _yet_, and the prediction of future errors is not possible. Consequently this situation is not stable."

The reason errors are so unpredictable is that even if both subjects are predictable, you set yourself up for countless synchronization (improper serialization/race conditions) issues, reliant on non-predictable external factors (memory assignments, system loads, etc).

Anyhow...

cheers,

catch

Edited to add: Ewww, GRC is just gross.

[DakX]

I have used both firewall. First sygate and now Zonealarm. I must say that i have encounterd the error showing it as not repsonding. Also i had the feeling that it slowed my startup down. I never had any problems installing it. I don't find Zonealarm to be more userfriendly, with sygate you can see what program are running and where those come from. With Zone thats not alway's clear, and besides it only has room for 4 icons. What i do find usefull is the stop that Zone has. BUt i don't know if that works. IF you ask me, sygate has the upperhand. But thats just personal opinion.