14 DAY TRIAL // Fire is one of the hazards that I was somehow afraid of for a long time, but in time, I learnt to care less about things that don't affect me directly. After all, I could as well be blown by a bomb or hit by a car before having a fire happening at home. Anyway, my computer can be protected by a firewall only in the virtual world, because not even the best program from this category can protect it from flames, but you don't have to worry about that now, since network intrusions can be much worse than flames in most cases...
What I have for you today is the 30 days trial of a program simply called NeT Firewall. Its latest version is 2.3.2.6 and the price required for registering the program is 49.95$ for less than 10 licenses. The benefits that you enjoy after registering are: one year technical support via email, free upgrades for a year, product notification by email and Beta testing for newest versions.
The setup package of this program comes inside a 3.6MB ZIP archive and I found it very easy to install, as it happens with most programs. What I really enjoyed with this program is its lack of stress factor. To be more specific, it didn't jump on my head with countless popups asking me what to do, but of course that this nice behavior has a dark side too, because this program failed all firewall tests that I ran. Don't worry, there's only one reason for this, that being the fact that the program's options weren't configured properly at that time, and we're getting there right away...
I don't want to rush things, so I'll say a few words about the program's interface now, as usual. I don't want to sound rough, but this program's interface is here just to support its features, and I don't see the results of any real design work here. Anyway, don't worry. NeT Firewall has an ordinary Windows interface, but well organized and having as a main strong point its ease of use. The main window has a main menu, a toolbar, a treeview of the program's areas and a view area. These being said, I think it's time to explore the treeview I have just told you about, because there are located all the tools.
As I said, you don't have to face an assault of the pop up windows, but if you want this program to work the right way, you'll have to spend a little time for setting it up the right way. I will give you some hints regarding this topic a little later, but now I'll move on to the Overview area of the program that shows up when starting NeT Firewall for the first time.
This area shows a real time graph of incoming, outgoing and blocked traffic, as well as statistics of the filtered packets. What I would like to have here is a value of the data traffic to the right side of the graph (and maybe also a redesign, because this way it looks just like a VU meter...and we're not talking about music here!), but that's just an idea, and I can't really complain about something here. There is still enough left to discover, so let's move on.
I love hints, tips and tricks, and when a program makes them available inside its interface without hurting the overall look and feel, that's great. NeT Firewall as branch of the tree has two information screens for you that allow you to find out more about the use of this program as a personal firewall and as a gateway/Internet server firewall.
The Network Interfaces area's content depends on the number of network adapters and software network interfaces present in your system, so I'll tell you about the items that can be found here regardless the device's type.
One of the best things that I found here is the chance to have different filtering settings for the different network devices you have, and I'll tell you about what I have here inside the Local Area Connection branch.
When the network device is selected, what you see in the view area are the six security levels available for it, and the default one is the Low Security Level that's also the first one.
Moving on, we find the 1st Level Stealth Security, that's the recommended one and allows by default locally established connections, using IP address based security.
The security levels grow gradually, the 2nd level using IP address and protocol based filtering, the 3rd ads protocol based security to the equation, the High Security Level blocks by default all traffic but you can override this with your custom filter rules and finally, the Emergency Level freezes the current network adapter and stops all network activity that uses it.
The next things you can explore for your network devices present here are the Packet Log, Port/Protocol Mapping and ICMP Security, and I'll leave them to you, because I have something even more interesting to show you now: rules!
After exploring the Network Interfaces area, you'll end up inside the Security Rules, and if you're in a hurry, this is the first place to be. If you're an expert, then probably you could teach me some tricks that I don't know yet about configuring firewalls, but that's not really needed, because we have a wizard here! Just look down and you'll notice a link called Run a Wizard, click it and you're almost done! The things to set are not many and the wizard doesn't leave space for wrong steps - rule type (allow or deny), description and rule priority, network adapter to apply it to (of course that you can apply a rule to any network adapter available, if you want), network protocol you want to control with this rule, direction (incoming, ongoing or all packets), source and destination IP addresses, ports, and that's all! It may look complicated, but it's really easy, you'll see!
At last, the Active Connections area lets you see a list with processes currently connected to the Internet and apply new rules, kill the undesired connections and more. These being said, I hope you'll enjoy this program as much as I did and have enough money to buy it...now, let's move to the conclusions!
The Good
NeT Firewall has all the features needed to be worthy of your attention, is easy to use and during the trial period, you can enjoy all the features of the full version!
The Bad
The documentation of this program is pretty thin for a commercial product, and I hope to see it improve in the future. I also expect some interface improvements and maybe a small Christmas discount...
The Truth
Net Firewall doesn't look as good as most of the firewalls I had here lately, but it does its job well and this is all that matters, after all. If you don't have some spare time, then make some spare time and try this program, it's going to worth your time, believe me!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
