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i was chatting to a friend last night and the topic of firewalls was the subject of discussion, my friend has three firewalls operating,she could not explain why. can someone tell me the advantages and disadvantages of this please, i use XP home edition as my OS or it uses me as the case may be!! would i benefit from using more than one firewall? would there be any software configuration problems?
cheers 99
All firewalls I have ever had experience with do warn against having other firewalls installed, as they could conflict against each other and actually leave more security holes. Use one good firewall. I prefer Outpost but there are others such as zonealarm or sygate.
you should have 2 hardware firewalls. software is a no-no cause they can conflict with eachother.
if it is a home box u are useing i presume it is.but when i had sygate personal firewall and zonealarm running at the same time my computer kept getting the BSOD and crashing *more than usual* and i switched over to outpost and found that to be really good
More than 1 firewall running on your box only causes trouble because they obstruct each
other, sometimes it can happen that your internet or lan access is completely blocked,
sometimes it lets your system crash, I also heard that it can cause new security holes.
I prefer to use the Sygate personal firewall or if you get an old box and some interests
in Linux give fli4l a try, it works very good.
If you have Windows Xp internet firewall on and then have you own firewall on eg Zonealarm, Do you still get any problems?
I never experienced problems while using Windows XP firewall and the one from Sygate.
By the way, the XP firewall isnt good, it only blocks incoming comunications,
you cant control if your box sends datas out, so trojans and spyware can connect to
whereever they want and, of course, Microsoft applications have no reductions.
Well, Zonealarm, didn't work on XP for me, I have now got Norton Firewall.
Yeah, I don't think it's a good idea to run two software firewalls.
Hardware firewalls sound great, though I have never really looked into them.
-Prankster
thanx for your response i use sygate on its own and it shall now stay on its own, i have talked to my friend why she uses three firewalls and she says its her computer she knows whats shes doin so i will leave her to it!!!
thanx once again at least i feel safe with the one firewall i have and i am alos going to look up the cost of a hardware firewall.
robbie99
I use XP's firewall, along with Sygate, and have been very happy with the results. I haven't had a single problem to date
The XP firewall works well against outside attack, but does nothing to stop all of M$'s programs (or any programs for that matter) from connecting to the internet.
Sygate works well by itself, and alerts you when any program attempts to connect to the internet. It also logs information from any computer attempting to connect to your computer and shows an alert when traffic is blocked.
I was previously using Zone Alarm Pro both alone and in combination with XP. ZA has always given me alot of grief, although I am fairly happy with it's performance. I wouldn't recommend it to a newbie; it works well when configured correctly, but it's a pain to get it that way. It also clogs up your memory.
-> I suppose if you really wanted a project that would give you some experience points you could set up a network in your room with a second box running linux with ipchains as your gateway. If you wanted to firewall/filter packets with ipchains you could read this:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/IPCHAINS-HOWTO.html