About sygate firewall and its problems

[Tuomas]

Hi, I don't know if this has been brought up, but know some of you use the free Sygate personal firewall as I did and my brother. I went to my broter's last weekend to fix his net connection.

Anyway, what I was supposed to say is that I noticed this thing in the internet: http://www.sygate.com/products/sygate-personal-firewall-pro.htm

Important Notice: Effective November 30th, 2005 all Sygate consumer firewall products will be discontinued. For technical assistance with these products, please email SMBSupport@Symantec.com. In addition, the consumer firewall support forum will be available for 60 days per our standard support policy. Note: this end of life only applies to the consumer firewall products and does not affect Sygate's Enterprise firewall and endpoint compliance products, which are still be updated and supported. Thank you and we look forward to assisting you with the wonderful line of Symantec products. Please click here for Symantec Support.

I am not sure if this is the reason, but as I was fixing my brother's computer and connection it appeared, that Sygate was infact blocking all the leaveing files and giving access to all that was coming from the internet. After speaking with the web instructor or what was her name, we came to the solution that the connection would work if we'd shut down the firewall.
Ã,  Ã,  Ã, Now I tried to find the Sygate icon on the desktop, only finding out that it had disappeared. So I went to C:\program files\Sygate and tried to run the main program from there. It wouldn't do anything andÃ,  couldn't find an uninstall file anywhere. I just uninstalled it from the windows program uninstall tool and right after that Ewido anti-malware updated itself.

On my computer just now I'm making a homepage, and downloaded FileZilla to upload my homepage to the server. For some reason it wouldn't connect even though I had all the usernames and paswords correct. Now at #AGS we came to the solution that my firewall might be blocking it. I tried to check out and realized the Sygate icon had disappeared from my desktop as well, and the main program wouldn't run.
Ã,  Ã,  Ã, After I removed it my ewido anti-malware updated itself, and FileZilla was able to connect the server. MY guess is, that Sygate was blocking the new programs because I've had it for a while, and it still let msn and my browsers through whereas Ewido and FileZilla are new programs on my computer.

Why I think that Symantec buying the rights to it makes a difference is, that they do not do it anymore, only make update files for it, and since I was using the free version which had no udate option visible to me, the only chance to keep it up to date was t oremove it and download a new version. Therefore my Sygate was an old version, but it shouldn't have broken up like that.

Consider this as a warning or so if you use Sygate personal firewall, I'd suggest you go and try to run the main program... Now I'm using ZoneAlarm, just to keep it cheap.

[LGM]

I gave up on software firewalls. The NAT in my router is good enough for me.

Attack free for almost three years.

[BOYD1981]

yeh i'm quite content with my hardware firewall, but Netgear have told me it's best to also use a software firewall as the one in the router won't stop outgoing traffic and any incoming traffic it produces.
but so far the firewall has turned out to be more use than the actual router itself so i don't bother with a software firewall anymore.

[Renal Shutdown]

Running the main program works fine for me.  I hated Zone Alarm when I had it.  If you needed a copy of SPF, I've probly got a copy of it somewhere.  Maybe it just needed a reinstall.