My new modem/router has an SPI firewall with lots of 'Advanced' settings. Will ticking all the boxes slow performance (on 1Mb ADSL)? If so, for average home user, which are worth ticking? With ZoneAlarm off and just SPI & NAT enabled I'm already fully stealthed at grc.com's ShieldsUp!.
It would probably increase latency rather than reduce your bandwidth as it has to monitor traffic, land attack checking for instance will check every packet to make sure they are authentic, and WILL take time, but this time will be milliseconds, and probably not enough to notice. The only way you can tell is actually by trying it, although I think you might actually notice during games. That is quite an advanced router for a home user, which one are you using?
Not an advanced price though, ebuyer's Extra Value, a Safecom SAMR-4112, seen very good reports of it in a few places. Doing what it says on the tin. There's a 4-port version for £30.
You shouldnt see any latancy issues, the router should be able to do it "on the fly" , 1mbit wont allow enough packets into your lan to cause an issue -- 100mbit maybe lol but not 1. Nice router btw and yes you should still keep ZA up and running on your PC -- it gives you an added layer of infromation to see what your PC is doing.
Well, please don't use ZoneAlarm as your software firewall it can create tons of problems and it isn't that great of a firewall.
I've been using it for years without a problem, and, with ZA, programs have to get permission if they want to phone out. If you're speaking from personal experience, maybe you should RTFM. If you're listening to net gossip, remember the user's wetware often causes more problems than his hardware and software. Why the modern fashion for slagging off any popular program that does what it says on the tin? ZA may not be Open Source (which it seems can do no wrong, however buggy, because you can fix all the bugs yourself - a theory that assumes the average joe can code better than the developers) but the 'adequate' version is free and works.
indeed it does, one version broke a lot of systems but that has since been fixed (luckily ) TBH all software firewalls are useless but thats a discussion for another thread
Well I must have had that version whenever I tried the product. It somehow made it so that I couldn't use some programs on my computer, one being Word. Even when I closed it out it still wouldn't work. But after uninstalling it the problem was resolved.
I have to back casey up here, ZA is one of the worst firewalls around, the lack of configurability and the general crappyness of it (it refuses to work properly with AOL (yes AOL is crap itself, but sygate works ok, so no reason why ZA can't). Sygate 4tw, shame it's been taken over by Norton , but I do have the latest version before it was taken over, and it should be a good enough firewall until the end of the year at least. As a rule, you should always have a software firewall on each computer, as hardware firewalls do not monitor/configure individual programs. So have you seen any latnecy issues cpemma?
The NPF (norton) sucks balls compared to sygate which is a great shame they should have used Sygates product and diched their own.
So whats the best software firewall out there? Whats a good virus scan program? Would be nice if they were free too
No problems affecting browsing, really, I've worked up to ticking the 4 basics above, left the others, they seem to be more nuisance than real damage to a home user. Problems between ZA and AOL don't exactly put me off it. Au contraire...
you want at least the top 3 of the advanced settings ticked, they will help protect against DDoS attacks // spoofing attacks etc. best firewall imo is sygate best free AV has to be avg
and if you want to pay for an antivirus nod32 is the way to go, works a charm and has a small footprint so doesn't use up masses of resources
