Firewall compatibility
Quote from: James_H So if your firewall trusts all traffic on your network, there is no point having the local firewall at all is there?
I agree of course, however, the MSWindows file and printer sharing service uses the very ports that many a trojan and backdoor rootkit exploit (TCP ports 139 and 445, and UDP ports 137 and 138). Essentially, your computer will be listening for unsolicited connections to the above ports. So, as soon as you open them up to allow your LAN machines to talk to each other you run the risk of exposing your machine(s) to all sort of nasties. A good solution is to only allow such connections particular private IP addresses and ports. The best solution is to ONLY run your MSWindows machines with plain user rights. Nasties will not be able to install and even if they do run, they will not be able elevate privileges to administrator - unless they are very very sophisticated. To this effect I am not sure that a 3rd party software firewall is particularly useful, or necessary, compared to the vanilla WinXP/Vista firewall; unless you like to be distracted all the time by their popups that alert you unecessarily about 99.9% harmless connections.
You could of course stop paying the Microsoft tax and the save the cost of all such peripheral or redundant MSWindows supporting applications, like the Norton bloatware. Do yourself a favour and install Linux.
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Regards,
Mick
Yes, Linux can seem complicated and if you venture in some Unix forums, or <aheam> Debian, you could be well ignored or worse abused, for not being absolutely the best coder in the universe. 
On the other hand there are some rather easy(ier) distributions out there, like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc. that do almost everything out of the box. OpenSUSE (I think) even comes with a preconfigured stateful packet inspection firewall. A lot of them have thriving and friendly communities that will guide your hand until you get familiar with the distribution. Hey, if my wife can manage her way around KDE almost anyone can! 
Anyway, I don't want to sound as a Linux evangelist - just my personal preference. A well configured MSWindows box, running logged in as plain user, behind a hardware firewall, is safe enough for most day to day activities. Under such circumstances a third party software firewall is just consuming space and CPU cycles. On the other hand, if you do not practice safe-hex a 3rd party firewall may offer some marginal protection, after you get infected . . . and only if it is not switched off by the malicious code. In that case it could well stop some outgoing malware.
Just my 2c's.
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Regards,
Mick
On the other hand there are some rather easy(ier) distributions out there, like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc. that do almost everything out of the box. OpenSUSE (I think) even comes with a preconfigured stateful packet inspection firewall. A lot of them have thriving and friendly communities that will guide your hand until you get familiar with the distribution. Hey, if my wife can manage her way around KDE almost anyone can! Anyway, I don't want to sound as a Linux evangelist - just my personal preference. A well configured MSWindows box, running logged in as plain user, behind a hardware firewall, is safe enough for most day to day activities. Under such circumstances a third party software firewall is just consuming space and CPU cycles. On the other hand, if you do not practice safe-hex a 3rd party firewall may offer some marginal protection, after you get infected . . . and only if it is not switched off by the malicious code. In that case it could well stop some outgoing malware.
Just my 2c's.
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Regards,
Mick