Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Vista Firewall disaster

Well, this is not a Delphi related post, but it is something I need to say. All Vista compatible firewall I have tested suck. Have I been rude ?.. Ok... sorry.. All Vista compatible firewalls really suck.

You may think that I say that easilly, but not... that is not the case. I have been testing following trial versions of Vista compatible Firewalls:

Comodo, Agnitum Outpost Firewall 2008, Jetico Personal Firewall, Lock'n'Stop, ZoneAlarm, Norton Internet Security 2008.

In all cases except with Jetico and Lock'n'Stop the resources and speed penalties are really high, or they simply don't work, or worst, they hang the system. Agnitum Firewall once installed doesn't lets the system to be rebooted, Jetico Simply freezes the whole system, Lock'n'stop just blocks the system randomly, Zonealarm.. oh.. zonealarm... it decreases my system speed in about 25%. Disaster.. really disaster. But do you know what really annoys me ? That no firewall except Zonealarm and Jetico lets you disable the hashing of an application. I am connected permanently to the internet during my coding. My applications usually access SQL Servers around my LAN. Each time I compile my application and execute it , its SHA checksum changes so all firewalls bug me that the application has changed and ask me what to do... How can the coders of the firewalls not add this easy feature to implement to disable this checsum check on certain applications. Incredible.