Using Winblows "Firewall" at the moment. I had ZoneAlarm at one point, then a friend suggested Tiny Firewall. Any other suggestions?
Buy a cheap router, pretty much anything you buy will be better than any software you can put on your desktop computer. Firewalls are something which works better when you install it once at the edge of your network, rather than putting a separate one on every computer.
pf is a pretty good firewall.
personally I use zonealarm, but there are some other good ones out there. Just none that I can remember right now...
>>2 has a good point, you should never have your computer directly connected to the internet (as in having an external IP) But software firewalls will protect against things that you download, (like a virus in a file or such)
>>4 If that is the case, the software is not a firewall, it is a virus scanner.
Let's keep these two things distinct, as they are.
Besides, you can set up a virus scanner at an HTTP proxy too.
What about for laptops? You don't really have control over the network when you go online away from home. Some are behind routers, sure, but there's other users on the network you connect to who may not be too friendly.
Tiny Personal Firewall is a decent software firewall.
But software firewalls aren't worth that much. The best they can do is protect permanent services from a recent remote exploit.
Zonealarm.
even the free one gives you enough program control to get you through the day.
comodo
Zonealarm.
comodo personal firewall
Comodo is the only good firewall that was built to be free. The only thing I don't like is that it's getting a bit into the antivirus territory. It's been rather good to me with keeping things from escaping (stuff that phones home)
>>13
Seconded.
If all you want to do is prevent programs from phoning home, get version 2.4. It works fine, is easy to configure, can configure by application and port/IP addresses, and it's more lightweight than 3.0
It's more reliable than ZoneAlarm. Won't mess with your torrents.
3.0's awesome though, because when you have the Defense+ enabled, you basically can monitor when a program is trying to do anything to your system. It's like a firewall between processes. But, if you really need to run untrusted programs, better to just get VMWare and make a VM.