Antonio Bello posted on February 03, 2009 02:18
This is a good news for all of you, like me, thinking that Zone Alarm is the best available firewall. I've been using ZoneAlarm for years, until I had to install Vista 64 on my Lenovo T61p, and discover that ZoneAlarm is not compatible. In fact, until now, ZoneAlarm was compatible with 32 bits platforms only.
I think I've tried all internet security suites in the meantime, such as Outpost, Steganos, Kaspersky, TrendMicro, McAfee, and so on, but I haven't been able to find one having the same power and flexibility of the Zone Alarm firewall. Finally I found in the Comodo firewall a good alternative, although in my opinion not as flexible and simple as ZoneAlarm. Considering that Comodo is a free product, it's a great alternative, although I still prefer to pay and have ZoneAlarm.
By the way, the wait is (almost) over. After several delays, at last the 64 bit compatible version of ZoneAlarm has gone beta a couple of months ago, and it's freely available for download - of course, until the beta phase is completed. Since the first beta I wanted to give it a try, and I have to say that it was, and still is, quite stable for everyday usage. There are still a number of known issues to be fixed, but in my opinion these are minor issues.
A new beta has been released on average every 2 weeks, the last one just a couple of days ago.
What I like more in the Zone Alarm Firewall, and that I haven't found in other firewall (without complicate configurations), is the ability to quickly configure each application and service in order to:
- enable/disable access to the local network
- enable/disable access to the internet
- block/allow connections form the local network
- block/allow connections from the internet
For example, in my development workstation I have installed and often use IIS for development and testing only, so I don't want IIS to accept connections from the internet. In such case I just need to locate the IIS Worker Process from the Program Control list, and set the Server/Internet option to block and Server/Trusted to Allow. With these 2 simple operations now IIS is able to accept connections from the local network and automatically rejects all incoming requests originating from the internet.
The beta is available at this page: http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/beta/zabeta.html