What is the toughest firewall?

yeah, like black ice too. have you tried conseal pc firewall, config is a torture, but it stops everything you config it to stop ;D

I'm using NeoWatch by analogX
Easy to use, but it is hard to tell how strong it is.
I'm planning to let a friend of mine try to acess my
machine from his linux machine.

For what it's worth I'll second the "turn it off" approach. Even if you do have a firewall, it's best to leave it off when you're not using it if you can. (Personal experience, see the "hacking?" post.)

ive tried zonealarm , im not sure how tuff it is but it gets good reviews from every pc mag, though its more for just home users.

i agree with the 'windows disservice' post, run a linux box like rj and use it as the entry to the network from outside.

im to lazy to have any kind of protection (virus or firewall) on my pc, i dont have any sensitive info on it and i format it to often to care about viruses

And hardware firewalls like those from the barricade routers...are they any good... does anyone know that?? ??? I'd really wanna know...

It seems to differ many are quite simple
I have a linux firewall now, had Neowatch before
which according to shields up https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2
neowatch was really good all ports in stealth mode
but my linux route/firewall has all ports as closed
good but not as good as stealth (ports are not there)
it is called floppyfw http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/faq.html
and has DHCP connects and logs in my ADSL
and I can run 100 machines if I like and have big hub  

well, anything that runs ontop of *nix would be a good start....

what is the point of having the best firewall when your base OS is trash?

I use Neo Watch. You can get from http://www.sling.to/fosi/ I like it because it lets to Neo Trace it. Check out that site they got some cool stuff.

If ya patch it often and good, and add a couple of third party addons, for scanning http/ftp traficc for viri, I think Microsoft for once realeased an excellent product in Microsoft ISA Server ( Internet & Acceleration server ).

I use it as The 0nly point of access at our corporation, and it's superb, once u get used to the interface (may seem a bit confusing the first time u look at it).
I'm becoming a devil @ packet filters

And it's pretty cheap compared to other solutions out there....

Cl0x

I can also recommend ZoneAlarm for W95/98/NT as properly working, easy to use and configure freeware.
It's good for desktop PC with limited resources but I think it would also work well on servers.
Steve from grc.com recommended it and I aslo have it installed on one of machines for long time.

As for W2000 I prefer to set filters manually, that's fun

Cheers
Chef



P.S. If you want to try I still have the 2.1.25 v (with no pop-ups).