pwnt.be

Let’s be honest here. The reliability of Kerio Personal Firewall has gone down the drain since Sunbelt Software acquired it. Moments after reinstalling Windows XP last week when I got my new motherboard, I got a khips.sys-related BSOD, which was weird to begin with, since I don’t even enable the Host Intrusion Prevention component—I’m behind a DD-WRT router and my ISP blocks all incoming traffic below port 1024.
Nonetheless, I decided to give KPF the benefit of the doubt, and everything seemed nice and dandy for a while. Then, suddenly, my Internet connection started to seem really sluggish. Even surfing the Web was an utter pain: most of the requests timed out, and I’m used to surfing at 20 mbps, so. Everything was fine on my laptop, so I concluded either Firefox or Winsock was acting up. Since Firefox never fails, I was pretty certain it was the latter. Indeed, the ever so nice TCPView revealed tons of dangling sockets. Taking a wild guess, I blamed the firewall, uninstalled it, and everything was back to normal. Hence, I’ll be steering clear of KPF from this day forward.
Now, obviously, I needed an alternative. I went for the obvious choice: Comodo Firewall Pro is pretty dang nice and completely free. Its features are pretty similar to KPF’s, with the exception of an application rule editor that’s a bit tedious—it does get the job done though. According to the Wikipedia article, version 3.0 is due next week. I’m relatively excited to see if they’ll indeed have improved on an already fine product.