firewalls Comodo and Outpost Firewall discussion

[James_A]

... you may want to ditch all of Comodo's products and switch to Outpost Firewall Free. Comodo's actions have gotten far too shady within the past months.

Could you elaborate, please Tarun? Is Comodo now off the recommended list in the Wiki?

[Tarun]

I've heard many bad things about Comodo, including how they issue SSL certificates to known malware hosting websites. When someone brings it to their attention they revoke it, but why are they not checking into the sites before issuing them? And if they issue the certs to known malware sites, who's to say they wouldn't flag known malware as Trusted in their firewall?

Comodo will be removed from the wiki. Especially once Outpost Firewall Free supports Windows 7.

[James_A]

Thanks.

I heard about the Comodo SSL Certificate issue, where Eddy Nigg (founder of StartCom) managed to acquire a Comodo cert for mozilla.com back in December 2008.

Five minutes later I was in the possession of a legitimate certificate issued to mozilla.com - no questions asked - no verification checks done - no control validation - no subscriber agreement presented, nothing.

Coincidentally I am trialling Outpost 6.5 Free FW on an old laptop at the moment.

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[Tarun]

James, I think you'll enjoy Outpost Firewall a lot more. It may be a little locked down, but it still does pretty much everything one would typically need. Though it's a shame it doesn't work on Windows 7.

[0_0]

Coincidentally I am trialling Outpost 6.5 Free FW on an old laptop at the moment.

If you find the time when done, your impressions of the firewall would be much appreciated. I still use ZoneAlarm 7.0, it is now at

9.x but I would like to find an alternative free firewall if it bests ZoneAlarm 7.0 Pro (I paid for 7.0 but have heard of issues with the

latest ZA Pro - bloated, heavy CPU usage etc - I would like to find a comparable free firewall if one exists). ;)

[James_A]

I asked for these posts to be moved to a new topic, (thanks Tarun), so I could report on my impressions of Outpost, then found myself without any free time for a few days ...

First impressions:

I chose Agnitum Outpost Free, because I have an old laptop that is still running Windows 2000. I needed a firewall that was compatible with Windows 2000 so I can use the laptop for network testing and other lightweight duties. Outpost Free is a 17MB download and an easy step-by-step wizard install. It automatically sets up rules for a heap of standard software.

When first installed, however, I tried running a Belkin PCMCIA WiFi card because I had not yet replaced the broken ethernet daughter card and immediately found myself without any internet connection at all. Outpost minimises to the System Tray when running and hovering over its icon with the mouse displays a balloon popup with the current IP address. An address of 169.254.xxx.xxx meant no connection to the DHCP server. I couldn't seen to find a connection at all, whatever settings I tried in the various dialogs so in the end I (1) disabled the Agnitum Outpost driver in the network connection Properties dialog and (2) rebooted Windows, which finally solved that. I've since learned, from a trawl through the various Outpost forums, that I'm not the only one with this problem. It seems Outpost occasionally doesn't like old (or older) network cards. Anyway, a week or so later, some more fine tuning and it is currently running fine with Firefox and with the Agnitum Outpost network driver now RE-enabled again.

I haven't had much time to really test it, but I should be able to do so over the next few weeks. In the meantime I found it worthwhile downloading the PDF manual for the full Outpost Pro firewall (OFP_Getting_Started_EN.pdf) even though over half of the manual is not relevant, because it explains the meaning of the various terms and phrases used in the firewall settings dialogs.

(to be continued over the next few weeks, as time permits...)

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[James_A]

... Though it's a shame it doesn't work on Windows 7.

The new paid-for version (Outpost PRO 7) now supports Windows 7. The free version, however, remains at version 6.5.

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[Tarun]

Yeah, I've had the Pro version for a while now and been thrilled with it.

I think the Pro version of 6.5 worked on Windows 7. I know 6.7 did.

I hope they update the free version to support Windows 7 very soon now that Pro 7.0 is out.

[Tarun]

I'd be interest to hear what others think of these two firewalls.

[James_A]

I chose Agnitum Outpost Free, ...

I haven't had much time to really test it, but I should be able to do so over the next few weeks. ...

Well, that was the intention, but work and an intermittent crashing problem intervened.

Over the weeks the laptop would randomly crash, causing some corruption to the filing system. It got so that Windows would not reboot, it just crashed during startup. Even a Repair Install of Windows failed to fix it. Nothing seemed to fix it. That's the first time that I've not had either Recovery Console or a Repair Install of Windows get a computer up and running in some fashion.

Eventually I used a live CD to repair the file-system damage, then used a second live CD to resize the partition. Finally, I created a new parallel install (from CD) of Windows on a newly-created second partition. That worked. It worked, that is, until I progressed my way through the list of drivers needed to connect all the hardware showing as unknown devices. As soon as I installed the modem driver, however, everything started failing again. (IBM Thinkpads have connections to just about everything once connected to the dock: PS/2 for keyboard & mouse, USB, PCMCIA, parallel, serial, Ethernet, telephone for Modem, infra-red (IrDA), VGA, DVI-D ...)

I finally narrowed it down to failing hardware on the mini-PCI daughter card attached to the motherboard. This holds an Intel Ethernet connection and a Xircom modem. It was the Xircom modem part which was failing. Install a driver for it and reboot, the driver tries to initialise the modem at boot, but crashes instead, bringing down Windows with it.

That's the second of three of those that has failed on me, so a look through the IBM Service Manual and a hunt on eBay brought me the alternative card by 3Com, instead. About 90 updates later and Windows is running again.

This weekend, I'll re-install the Agnitum Outpost firewall and then maybe I'll pick up the story again.

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[Ultimate Predator]

Is Outpost Free still recommended despite it now being a suite? I know that Outpost Frree will disable the anti-virus automatically if it detects avast, but is avast still the recommended antivirus?

[Tarun]

While I have yet to test the new Outpost Free Suite, I am still recommending it. If you're allowed install options, I'd do Firewall Only. Then use MSE or Avast for antivirus.

[Ultimate Predator]

While I have yet to test the new Outpost Free Suite, I am still recommending it. If you're allowed install options, I'd do Firewall Only. Then use MSE or Avast for antivirus.

There aren't any options when installing, but if avast is already installed/running then Outpost picks this up and auto-disables the anti-virus, which is fine.

[Tarun]

That's very good to know. Thanks!

[Swingline]

This is quite frustrating. I can only download the Pro version of Outpost because the free firewall says it is only available on Windows 7 x86 when I try to install it. So it seems the free version is not available to x32 and x64 users. I already don't trust this company, they make you donwload it from download.net in the first place. The security suite stops working after a few days as well and it prompts you to buy it.

[Tarun]

That's strange. Did you get it from http://free.agnitum.com/ or somewhere else? It sounds like you may have gotten their normal suite which has a 30 day tryout period instead of the free suite.

[Eldmannen]

Does third-party firewalls offer any advantage to the firewall in Windows 7?

[Swingline]

That's strange. Did you get it from http://free.agnitum.com/ or somewhere else? It sounds like you may have gotten their normal suite which has a 30 day tryout period instead of the free suite.

I did download it from that site and it says its only usable with a x86 processor

[Tarun]

Under the big "Download Free" button is a link for the x64 versions that reads, "or download 64-bit version".

[Swingline]

Well I feel retarded, guess its time to update my eye prescription.

[Eldmannen]

x64 is a misnomer since it indicates that it is an entirely different instruction set architecture (ISA).

It is a instructions that extend the x86 (IA-32) architecture with 64-bit instructions.

So it should be called x86-64.

[James_A]

Well I feel retarded, guess its time to update my eye prescription.

It's just as well I wasn't drinking my coffee when I read that, otherwise I might just need a new keyboard.

On a more serious note, I also don't like downloads from cnet/download.com. Didn't Agnitum used to have a direct download link?

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[Tarun]

Yeah they did James. I need to check the toolkit to see if they work still.

[Eldmannen]

Download.com is now a s*** site. It bundles they're s*** software to installers and stuff.

It is untrusted, unreliable, and malicious. Download.com is running a scam.

Don't trust this guys.