firewall

[Guest]

why cant i use a second party firewall (zonealarm) with xp?for some reason, i dont trust the built in firewall. there is no configurable access control, and zone alarm does. as a matter of fact, it blocked "explorer.exe" from accessing the internet. why would a core o.s. file be trying to access the internet? i read somewhere that the xp firewall blocks all traffic not actually requested by your machine, so any spyware can access the net. or windows files. just seems strange. thanks for any help.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

You are correct. XP's firewall only blocks inbound traffic, not outbound traffic. 3rd party firewalls like Zone Alarm can do both. There is no reason you can't turn off XP's firewall, and use a 3rd party alternative.

Various components of the OS, particularly Explorer.exe and Iexplore.exe are so tightly integrated that it can be difficult to differentiate which process is actually requesting the internet access.

 

[Guest]

thanks duog. but iv'e tryed that. i shut down xp's firewall, started zonealarm, and i am unable to access the internet. rb

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Turn on XP's firewall and disable Zone Alarm. If you can access the internet, you need to check your Zone Alarm configuration. You do NOT want to access the internet without a firewall, unless you're certain you've got all the latest Securty Updates from Microsoft.

 

[John]

thanks duog. but iv'e tryed that. i shut down xp's firewall, started zonealarm, and i am unable to access the internet. rb

I recommend a Linksys cable/adsl router. It provides stealth on the
internet (with a slight tweak to solve port 113) *and* you get Network
Address Translation thrown in. So not only are you invisible, but you
are not leaving your actual address wherever you go, like this site for
example (the detailed message headers disclose the senders IP Address).
This combination (stealth plus NAT) is pretty hard to beat I think. It
makes you the invisible man out there in web land.

It's easy to set up and so far mine hasn't lost the connection once.

 

[Guest]

thanks to doug and john. it's working now, like doug said, zone alarm needed tweaking. i thought there was a conflict, but it didn't make sense when xp's firewall was shut down. i have a linksys hub, but maybe i will go for the router. thanks again for the help. rb