I’m trying the new Tiny Personal Firewall V5.0 beta. So far, pretty slick!
I’ve been running the free version of Sygate on my laptop for a few months now and it does a good job but it seems to take forever to come off hibernate so I thought I’d give Tiny a try. Now, I used and liked Tiny back before Kerio split off from them and am using Kerio V2.1.4 on my desktop (yeah, the link says 2.1.5 is out but I haven’t had problems so I haven’t updated). I tried Kerio’s V3 beta on the laptop and was pretty happy with that but had two kinds of rules: simple and advanced and it kinda confused me which is why I went to Sygate. Technology changes and Sygate hasn’t been updated for a while (I’m sure there’s something in the works) so I thought I’d try Tiny again.
It looks like you’re actually configuring a firewall — not something I’d recommend for the novice user! You can define a set of protocols, ports and direction and then refer to that in the rules. It’s got IDS, file protection, application protection and verification and a pretty decent activity and connections display. This beta expires sometime this monrh. I’ll keep you posted.