The Dreaded Personal Firewall

It's a *bad* idea to trust software to do the job you should be doing. There is nothing magic about what Outpost does. It compares signatures in its data base to the data it is filtering. Of course, no signature, no match.

I personally would never use a Norton product after my past experiences with them. As you mentioned, Norton tends to be fairly slow in terms of responsiveness and it also seems to bog down the system, especially on the older machines. And yes, I have seen that traffic blocking without reason also. Norton stuff also tends to post a *massive* number of entries to the registry, which I find a little disconcerting. I know that many use NAV and love it, but to me Norton is the King Of Bloat. So as such, I'd stay away from it.

If you want a 'suite', the 2 I liked best were the ZA Suite and the BitDefender Suite. ZA had the stronger firewall, and BD had the stronger AV, so depending on which you prefer, one might be more suited than the other. But I think both of them are much more desirable than Norton. Also most of the other 'suites' did not impress me much.

As someone else mentioned, there is no substitute for your brain though. I don't really believe there is any one product that will prevent a user from destroying his or her machine. A little training for the user might go a long way.

Hi Brad,

The above is not totally the case. A NAT or any other kind of router/network firewall would protect your "inside" network at the "perimeter" of your inside network from traffic from the "outside" network, but that router or network firewall would not do anything to protect any machines on the inside network from any other machines on the inside network. If a threat ever got onto one of the machines on your inside network, it (the threat) would be free to attack any other machines on your inside network (remember Blaster?).

That's one of the other main reasons for putting a firewall like Kereo or Sygate, or whatever, on the individual machines that are on your inside network, i.e., the per-machine firewall would prevent attack from other machines on your inside network.

Jim

Someone recommended a Sonicwall for our network. Looks good except that it only has a 5 port switch. I can set it up between our switch and the internet, but I would prefer that it have 24 ports. That would machines on the inside network from each other, wouldn't it?

Get yourself a seperate switch, like this one;

If this device is filtering in a sensible way, too: yes.

And this is, what "Personal Firewalls" are failing to do in a secure way.

This is a good idea anyway.

Yours, VB.