Ask LJ: Firewalls

[coraa]

Firewalls!

The subscription to Trend Micro PC-cilin that came with my laptop just ran out, and I'm looking at other firewall options for my laptop. I tried the ZoneAlarm free firewall, and it seems to work pretty well... except that, when I'm on my desktop, it won't let me access my laptop via 'my network places' anymore. And the free version of ZoneAlarm doesn't give me any way to tell it 'yes, attempts to access this laptop from that computer are legit and should be allowed.' Since copying files over from the desktop via web folders/network places is a major part of my file synchronization/backup process, this isn't a feasible situation.

Then I wonder whether just using the router's firewall (I know it has one, because Pav has done some fiddling with its configuration) would be sufficient.

So, because LJ Is My Decision-Making Process, a poll:

[Poll #1176173]

Also, and this is for comments, do you like what you use? Would you recommend it? Or does it annoy you?

(I'm actually not irritated at all, but the icon was too appropriate not to use...)

Comments

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

I need to make a side note here (probably irrelevant to coraa but potentially important to people thinking about Windows firewall) that I discovered recently, to the tune of several hours of beating my head against a server cabinet: Never run Windows firewall on a W2K3 server if you have the W2K3 server's built-in VPN support enabled. NEVER. They're incompatible. You will have to not just stop but remove the VPN support in order to ever run the firewall, and of course when you remove the VPN support it'll forget all your settings and you'll have to reconfigure.

I don't know if this is true of anything but a 2K3 (and maybe 2K) server. If anyone's successfully running the built-in versions of VPN and firewall on, say, vista, please let me know.

So anyway, that is one situation you should use a third-party firewall.