India Broadband Forum

smoothvibes

What's a Firewall?
With the frequency of computer viruses, spyware, adware, and phishing attacks on the Internet today, there's an ever increasing need for software to protect your computer from these potential threats. A firewall is a program designed to do just that.

In fact firewalls are so common today, that you may already have a firewall on your computer that you are not aware of. Generally, firewalls come packaged with antivirus software or if you have Windows XP, it also comes pre-packaged with a firewall to protect your machine.

While they are intended to protect your computer from a variety of potential threats, firewalls often inadvertently causes other legitimate programs on your computer to malfunction as well. Mostly, this is because a firewall has no way of knowing whether a program poses a threat to your computer without input on your part. And while we've done everything we can to reduce the likelihood that any of Y! Messanger's vital pieces are blocked by a firewall on your computer, it's likely that your firewall will still misjudge a few significant pieces of Y! Messanger, causing any number of different issues inside your Y! Messanger installation and internet access.

Can I Stop my Firewall from Interfering with application's?

Yes. There are several ways that you can stop your firewall from interfering with applications. A common way to test whether your firewall is causing a problem in application is to simply disable it momentarily and try to work in application again. If the problems dosen't occur, it's probably a problem with your firewall. Of course, while disabling or removing your firewall may be a great short term solution, in the long term it leaves you open to a variety of security threats.

What Kinds of Problems Occur When Running Antivirus or Firewalls?

While not all users experience difficulties running antivirus or firewall protection, customers have had problems completing the following tasks that were corrected by disabling the antivirus software.

• System is generally slow when starting up.
• Downloading and installing updates may fail.
• Sending or receiving message or emails may fail.
• Downloading files can be slower or may even fail.

These issues can be somewhat difficult to diagnose, as you would not receive error messages indicating the problem is specifically related to your antivirus or firewall software. Additionally, running antivirus software continuously, particularly across a network can cause your system to respond slowly since it scans each file as it's accessed and modified. Slowness will vary widely from one user to another, from the insignificant to extremely delayed system response.

Note: It is advisable to have only one active Firewall on your computer, having more than one active Firewalls on the system may slow down all Internet activity, as the data packets that enter or leave the computer have to go through multiple checks. Not just the internet activity, the general system performance may also slow down and some applications may become unresponsive because of excessive load in the memory.

Most people are not aware of the presence of the Windows Firewall on the system, it gets installed on the computer either at the time of installing Windows or at the time some updates like Windows Xp Service Pack 2 gets installed on the computer automatically. Whichever Firewall that you may have, please do not forget to look for the Windows firewall.

To check if the firewall(s) are the reason of the problem that you might be facing, try disabling the firewall(s) and check if the problem persists, if the issue gets resolved, the firewall is the problem.

__________________

Instead of being afraid of situations, consider them to be your teacher and learn a lesson from them.

ethanjames

I know these.....but i expect many more information..

smoothvibes

please post what else you want to know

newprouser

I not sure abt that, I use norton AV wich has firewall capablities (intrution prevention) along with commodo firewall, I don't notice any internet slowdown. I get around 220-250 kbps.

smoothvibes

In most of the cases 2 firewall's gives bad impact on speed and if you are not affected by that then you may like to offer something good to god

lets come back to topic
mate i said that It is advisable to have only one active Firewall on your computer, having more than one active Firewalls on the system may slow down all Internet activity
if you are not facing any speed issues then its fine but still i will not advice you to use 2 firewalls.

newprouser

Thats the 2nd reason i got today to offer sth 2 him, 1st one's
here

Yea i guess ur right , plus it wastes more memory.

DM111PUSP

In Simple words :-
let us assume a Virus in Computer = a Terrorist in Real Life.

Antivirus Working Machanism : "if a person has weared some special dress like ***** and ******* then conclude he is a Terrorist".
(Signature Matching)

Firewall Working Machanism : "No matter how someone looks like, if anyone is doing something which is not allowed under the rules, then conclude he is a Terrorist".
(Behaviour Matching)