The Little Firewall That Could

Quite a few years ago, I installed Sygate Personal Firewall on my PC. It was free, which was its biggest draw at the time. I had tried ZoneAlarm, but just didn’t care for the interface so much.

A year or two ago, Symantec corporation bought Sygate, and promptly killed off all of Sygate’s products. I wasn’t too pleased about that, but, the Sygate firewall had only had one or two updates over the years, and ran very reliably, so I figured I’d just keep on keepin’ on with it.

About six months ago, I got the ‘bug’ to try some new applications, and decided to try out all the firewalls that were available, once again. I tried a bunch of free firewalls out there (I’m sure there are good $$ firewalls, but my budget didn’t allow for $$…).

I tried ZoneAlarm again. I tried Tiny Personal Firewall. I tried Sunbelt/Kerio Firewall. I tried Comodo Firewall. I tried Outpost. I had used BlackICE years ago, but it was never truly satisfactory, so I skipped that. The XP built-in firewall is a non-starter as far as I’m concerned.

There are more firewalls out there, surely. But it seemed pretty clear from spending a few hours to days with each of these that none of them was that great. Comodo came close - but I experienced a handful of lockups of my network during very high traffic times, which was just not acceptable.

I reinstalled Sygate Personal Firewall. That was back in October. I have no plans on ever switching, unless by some bizarre chance some sort of exploit is found in it. It is only minimally intrusive, it does everything right (according to the http://www.grc.com firewall tests), it has a very small footprint, and it works. What more can you ask for? 

I had considered adding a mirrored copy of it here on my server, but I’m not a trusted source by any objective measure, so instead, here’s some links to ‘official’ distributions of it. The last version released was 5.6, build 2808 (5.6.2808)

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Firewall/Sygate-Personal-Firewall-Free.shtml
http://www.tucows.com/preview/213160
http://www.filehippo.com/download_sygate_personal_firewall/
http://www.simtel.com/product.download.mirrors.php?id=53687
http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=sygate

20 out of 20 klaatus! It’s that good!