Sygate personal firewall is my favourite free firewall and has features that blow away a lot of the commercial firewalls available out there. At this point, let me stress that just because you have a hardware router or firewall you still need a software firewall on all your PCs to stop worm outbreaks inside your network.

Obviously your hardware router/firewall protects you from hackers trying to connect to your machine from the internet, but what about viruses and trojans that may slip past your virus scanner and install themselves on your PC. The first thing these nefarious programs usually do is connect to remote servers to upload data scraped from your computer or download additional nefarious plug-ins. A software firewall will alert you to these connections and let you know all is not well.

If you run Sygate personal firewall (FREE) on all your PCs then you should have this covered. Installing Sygate personal firewall on your workstation PCs is very simple. Most users will be using sygate in this configuration and it's pretty simple, however if you're having problems with sending and receiving email you should below

Initially when we installed Sygate personal firewall on Windows 2003 (with Active Directory) we were unable to log onto the domain from the computers in the test network. Some experimentation with the "Allow All" rule led us to believe this was more of a firewall settings hiccup than a bug in Sygate.

Many IT administrators will tell you that in a situation like this you need a corporate firewall like Microsoft ISA Server 2004 to firewall both the internet connection and the local LAN (yes that's right, the new version of ISA lets you set up firewall on as many NIC interfaces as you like) This is good advice but I find that ISA doesn't include any kind of application blocking. This is fine if you only use the server for administration and don't run applications on it, but if you're like me you'll want added security so if a malicious program does get onto the server then you'll at least receive a prompt when it [the unregistered program] tries to connect to the internet.

Before you create rules in Sygate you will want to untick the "Hide Windows Services" and "Hide Broadcast Traffic" boxes on the main Sygate window. This is because when you create a rule later, Sygate will remember if these boxes were ticked and not display some of the registered programs in the application list. This can be a real pain and took us a while to work out what was wrong. Obviously once you have finished configuring your firewall rules you can turn these on and off without a problem, but during configuration, turn them both off (unticked)

If you create an Allow rule for your local subnet (that's the protected LAN) that allows anything to or from that network card (192.168.1.x) on my test network, then Windows 2003 / Sygate does seem to allow Windows XP users to login (but windows 2k users logins take for ever - I call it the three-day login)

Depending on the services running on your sever you could start out with an Advanced Rule that is Allow-All for your LAN and then slowly tighten the rule by removing applications from the list of selected applications pertaining to this rule.

It can be hard to test if you have the rules right because the base rules in Sygate seem to block DHCP lease-givings meaning your workstation PCs won't be able to get an IP Number from the server and consequently can't access the network or internet. Manually dumping the IP lease and renewing it on the client PCs is a good way to fast track this rule testing process but we found that it wasn't always reliable. (Sometimes the PC would not renew it's lease after a cold-boot but would do a soft renew/release fine)

Unfortunately you might be in a situation where you want to employ some of the firewall features of Sygate on your Local Area Network (great if you don't really trust your local users that much) We've not had much success with setting rules to only allow certain protocols/ports purely because most users run a variety of programs that use all manner of ports and protocols. If your network environment is more strict you could of-course create simple rules to allow HTTP/Email only.

Article Comments / Talkback

Add Your Comments

Your Comments

Your Name:

Comments:

Please note: Your comment may take up to a day to appear on this website as all comments are checked for relevance and profanities.

Verification Code:

(required) Please type the number displayed above in the textbox. This helps us distinguish between real people and spam bots

	SoftBox
	Software you want

Using Cacti to measure temperatures
Guide to using Cacti with USB TEMPer thermometers

Free Internet TV
Download free internet TV

680i LT No sound
How to fix the sound problem on XFX Nforce 680i LT motherboards

Sygate Personal Firewall and Windows 2003
A quick guide to getting Sygate personal firewall to work with Windows 2003 and Active Directory

Virtual Computers
Need to run a different operating system on your PC but still want access to all your programs, emails and movies? a Virtual computer can do the job for you.

Desktop Sharing
No, it's not a new form of corporate downsizing, it's networking at its best!

Xenu Link Sleuth
Websites come and go, you'll need to check you website for link errors regularly

Top 10 Free Softwares
Our Top 10 List of the most useful free software you need for your PC

Mozilla Firefox Secure Browsing
Web browsers, we all use them, but how much to do know about them - and how much do they know about you?

Find more information on Google

	Web www.rjl.com.au