Norton Personal Firewall vs Zonealarm

I was thinking about buying Norton Personal Firewall and was wondering if it's any better than Zonealarm which I have been using? Any comments?

I've always liked Norton Antivirus but hated System Works, does the Personal Firewall bog down the system like System Works does?

I've got Zone alarm on my main desktop machine and haven't had any problems at all, just the occasional question when a new piece of software needs to connect to the net. (Particularly usefull for ill-gotten software that wants to connect to check it's authenticity, if you know what I mean ).

The only time I had trouble with it was when I got KDE 2 running on Cygwin, lots of server requests to authorise!

I could definitely recommend Zone alarm it can even talk to my routers built in firewall, which is nice...

Although I don't use it any longer I have been a long time user of Norton PF and before that Conseal by Signal9 (I believe Symantec bought their firewall engine technology from Signal9).

Norton PF IMHO is a good product, it's not cumbersome bloatware like System Works, it's a Firewall and that's that. It's a good all round product for the novice and expert user alike, it has a slider control to set the complexity level of it's control and interaction which suits most people I know. I believe that Zonealarm is a lot more simplistic in this respect but I could be wrong.

I've not used it in over a year so maybe it's improved but it had a Live Update facility to automatically get updated rulesets and the such like, these could be a bonus to a novice user but I don't know if that's you .

For me, the thing I liked most about PF was the ability to set very specific rules about what internet traffic was to be allowed or blocked. It could be a labour of love sometimes but I took a great deal of pride in being very careful setting rules and not to simply hit the 'Allow this' button when PF asked.

PF has a neat but potentially dangerous feature to block the transmission of personal information; You could optionally tell PF your home address, full name, bank details and so on. If it saw that information being transmitted from your PC to the internet it would popup a warning giving you the choice of what to do. I think it has other features like ad blocking and so on which could be handy too.

Although nothing is completely secure I don't trust Windows personal firewalls enough to reply upon them. IIRC, the Wm.Bugbear virus (and possibly others too) could recognise some personal firewalls and disable them.

Me? I use an appliance based firewall product called SmoothWall. In a nutshell, it transforms a defunct old PC and 2 network cards that you might have lying around into an external Linux based firewall applicance. Once it's initially setup you just need the system unit (no mouse/kbd/monitor required) and best of all the GPL version is free

it's a Firewall [...] it had a Live Update facility to automatically get updated rulesets and the such like

Isn't that a bit like a Band-Aid with a built-in razorblade? Would you then have to set up a second firewall to firewall these requests from the first firewall?

And an external, appliancey, firewall is solving a different problem: ZoneAlarm and friends deny unwanted outbound connections on an exe-by-exe basis and an external firewall wouldn't know enough to do that. Really you need both.

Peter

ZoneAlarm and friends also block inbound traffic, so for regular users you shouldn't need an external firewall, unless you have a LAN. Then an external firewall would be the best... I would recommend ClarkConnect, also a GPL Linux-based firewall.

Stig

Just to complicate the discussion, I prefer BlackICE Defender to either NortonPF or ZoneAlarm.

Thanks for the complication I installed Norton PF and I had to disable part of it to post a reply. I'll have to read up more on it and find out what I have set wrong.

an external, appliancey, firewall is solving a different problem: ZoneAlarm and friends deny unwanted outbound connections on an exe-by-exe basis and an external firewall wouldn't know enough to do that. Really you need both.

I agree that using both an appliance based firewall and a personal firewall together is the better solution.
But, on the assumption that *everyone* uses a regularly updated virus/trojan scanner, which I'm sure we'd all agree they should, it's my belief that if you are only going to run one firewall then the appliance type is arguably the better choice out of the two.

ClarkConnect appears to be very feature rich and versatile regarding the features it offers (FTP server, print server, mail server, webmail and so on). While this is a good thing in most respects I'm certain, I don't think these things have their place on a firewall - they should be hosted on something behind a firewall. With every feature you add to your firewall and with every extra running service, you open yourself up to more vulnerabilities and exploits. In other words, it becomes more like the thing(s) you are trying to protect.

In reply to:

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I had to disable part of it to post a reply.

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i have norton as well and have this same difaculty (the main reason i've hardly ever posted) if you find a workaround please share : )

I will. I'm sure over the holidays I will find the time to sit around and play with it. And to read the stupid thick manual that came with it. It's the ad blocking that is doing it I believe.

With ClarkConnect you select during installation what you want to install, so you can just install the firewall part and skip the rest. You also have the possibility to run it as a standalone server behind a firewall.

Stig

By what I understand, It has an option to filter out all cookies, thus breaking your ability to post here.

For me, the best cookie setting has always been to allow cookies from the same server, but block the rest.

It is set to accept cookies. Ah, I just figured it out. I unchecked enable browser privacy and it works fine

Cool, I'll add that to the error message that appears when you try to post with it enabled. Should save me a few e-mails here and there.

It is set to accept cookies. Ah, I just figured it out. I unchecked enable browser privacy and it works fine

If you want to re-enable browser privacy and still be able to post here the following should work for Norton PF2003:

Open up the personal firewall control window.

Click Options -> Personal Firewall
Web Content tab
Add Site empeg.comms.net
With the new entry selected, in the Global Settings tab (this should be the default tab).....
Uncheck Use default settings under Information About Visited Sites and choose Permit

Hey, thanks for the info. I'll do that.

Yep, that worked.

thanks

My Norton IS always caused my system to reboot when I'd do a FreeDB lookup with Exact Audio Copy... I was glad to get rid of it and go with a hardware firewall.