Anyone tried Jetico's new freebie firewall?

Has anyone tried the Jetico Firewall?

It's a freebie at this point because it probably is still in beta development.

Jetico also created BestCrypt and BCWipe.

Those are great products which I use everyday, and I figure their firewall might be a goodie also. I'm just afraid to download stuff still in the testing stage because I have a very temperamental computer and don't need any more crashes.

No. I have a bad habit of downloading and screwing around with a lot different programs for the free trial period. Some of them are sloppily written and screw up my dlls and other stuff.

I keep a good, clean Drive Image copy of my basic setup. I've had to revert to it quite a few times. That is one program that was *really* worth the money.

I use the freebie Avast AV, Kerio's 2.1.5 firewall and a number of Spyware and registry protection programs. Despite that, many downloads still have bitten me. But it's fun screwing around with tons of programs, even though I get bitten from time to time. : )

Jetico's firewall is a very good product, especially for a version 1.0. The interface is a little difficult at first, compared to Kerio 2.1.5, but you get used to it fairly quickly. The default rule set is pretty good, just requiring a few tweaks here and there to adjust it to your particular situation. All in all it's a pretty powerful product. And their support is very excellent, particularly for a free offering.

Some people report problems here and there, but they seem to be fixing them quite quickly. Technically it's probably still beta quality, but they're calling it out-of-beta version 1.0.

It's worth a try...

Replying to myself: Begin

It's not as intuitive as I'd prefer, but still doable, at least I thought so at first. The pcflank exploits battery BSODed me for some reason, and that doesn't happen with EZ Firewall, so I tinkered around a bit to see if I could harden it but eventually gave up, bailed out and reloaded my image.

Bottom line is a thumbs down from me. Maybe without running any aggressive exploits against it, I would have never experienced the failure, and someday later on might happy click myself into trouble, never knowing what bit me.

I'm sure the reason for good support for this freebie is that they need all the input they can get before placing it up for sale.

I must say their BCWipe and BestCrypt were well worth the dough which BestCrypt cost me, almost a hundred bucks. (I had nothing but problems with Scramdisk and other freebie encrypted volume programs.)

For now I'll stay with Kerio 2.1.5. It does the job and has a very simple interface. The only problem I've ever had with it is when I forget to take off my final block on everything else after having okayed what software I'm running. More than once I've screwed around with a "non-working" new program, wondering why it wouldn't work, when all the was necessary was to go into the Administration and take off that final block. That is how totally unobtrusive Kerio 2.1.5 is. You forget you are even running it.

This is OT, but I install many new and untested programs in a VMware virtual machine. It doesn't matter if they screw up the virtual machine, because I can discard all changes by reverting to an earlier snapshot of the machine. If they seem to work properly, I install them on my "real" system.

Matt M.

Yes, it's great marketing strategy. Involve users early on in the development process (beta testing) by giving them access to free software. Over time, the users develop a sense of ownership, being part of the "team". Now, they have a much larger potential revenue stream once the product goes live.