Zone Alarm does sell their product, but they at least provide a decent free version. Selling a network without some sort of basic internet security is like selling a house or a car without locks. True, you can buy bigger locks; but my guess is that future service packs and os upgrades will
accidentally break third party security measures, and M$ will charge through the nose for its own versions of the same products. Or integrate them into the OS and try to squeeze the above companies out of the game. But that's just a guess.
BTW; do the major Linux distro's set up a basic firewall? why not? Personally I think this is a serious shortcoming, especially since there are several decent gui front ends to iptables, and setting one up can take as few as ten lines in a script.
This will at least provide some protection from port scans and turn off outside access to services while allowing the user to surf the net or do email. Setting up a service should require knowledge about how to configure the firewall for that service. but anyway.
-t.
ps: although i just pulled that one out of my arse, i'm gonna test it.... later. -t.
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works for ftp (receiving), email, web browsing, and local Apache access.
The quick scan from
http://scan.sygatetech.com/ showed everything as blocked. I am currently editing this message with that hack of a firewall in place.
-t.
[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: beltorak0 ]