A no-nonsense personal firewall solution for windows. Finally?

[Mario F.]

It seems I may have found a perfect solution to my personal firewall needs. Since Tiny Personal Firewall (TPF) days that I haven't had the luxury of running a simple non bloated personal firewall solution. And have always been more or less on the lookout for something that could help me rid of Comodo.

I've been running for the past 3 months TinyWall. It's essentially a simple and no-nonsense rules manager for the Windows Firewall. As a bonus it also hardens WF against attempts at tampering with it. Windows Firewall has come a long way since Windows XP and it is today a much more reliable security solution. With TinyWall hardening and management features it has become perfect for my needs because it gives me access to software-based and port-based security without any of the bloat of more advanced security suits while avoiding the absolutely horrid Windows Firewall interface (although admittedly it has improved much). I feel like I'm back on the good old TPF days.

(Along with TinyWall, I've adopted MVPS HOSTS for my hosts file and manage it with HostsMan, for added security)

My only complaint about TinyWall is the choice of programming language and environment. It's been made on C# and runs on the .Net Platform 3.5. I'd have rather preferred if it had been developed in a non interpreted language. The benefit of a much smaller memory footprint would have been appreciated in an application such as this. The author has an entry about this on the FAQ webpage. But it is far from convincing.

[MutantJohn]

I didn't read the OP but is your solution Linux? Oh!

[phantomotap]

O_o

I'm actually more interested in "HostsMan", but out of curiosity, is the footprint of "TinyWall" a big deal?

No. I'm not talking about greedy application/services. I'm with you.

I'm asking because I'm getting two different methods in play.

From what I understand from the page, the "TinyWall" actually needs to remain in service along side the "Windows Firewall" which would make the overhead persistent.

From what I understood from you, you only need to run "TinyWall" to "harden" "Windows Firewall" rules and stuff, and if you only need to run it on occasion for updating rules, it seems like the memory wouldn't be a big deal.

Soma

[Mario F.]

Yeah. It's a resident application/service. In fact, only the service needs to stay resident. The client can be closed since TinyWall doesn't produce any sort of popups. It may be opened only when I need to change or add a new rule.

It's really not a big deal. Windows Performance Monitor reports a working set of 30MB of non shareable physical memory being used.

[Codeplug]

I use WF as well (normal interfaces).

I also use OpenDNS - originally because it was more available and faster than my ISP's - but then found that OpenDNS has options for blocking name resolution of whole groups of sites like "porn", "adware", etc.

I also use SpybotS&D "Immunize" functionality to import a bunch of sites that my browser should never hit.

I also use PeerBlock, for which there are list servers with maintained databases of groups of IP's like "porn", "adware", etc. So that's 3 databases of "don't ever go here".

For AV I use Security Essentials. Even though it's detection rate is bad compared to others, I've been happy with it's performance (in that I never know that it's running).

gg

[Yarin]

[/I]My only complaint about TinyWall is the choice of programming language and environment. It's been made on C# and runs on the .Net Platform 3.5. I'd have rather preferred if it had been developed in a non interpreted language. The benefit of a much smaller memory footprint would have been appreciated in an application such as this. The author has an entry about this on the FAQ webpage. But it is far from convincing.

Very good firewall. Who needs cruft like flexible file-based rule defining? Forget pf. Menus FTW.
C# was the right choice of language. Why use such an outdated language like C++? C# is the OTL, using anything else is just buggy and tantamount to premature optimization. If it's using too much RAM just by more.

[Mario F.]

I'm not feeling generous enough to try to understand if all you wrote is just some attempt at satire or your actual opinion. But, to clarify, TinyWall is not a firewall. It's a manager and hardener of the windows firewall. Which means it supports file-based rules. As well as protocol, port, IP and domain rules.

[Yarin]

[snip] But, to clarify, TinyWall is not a firewall. It's a manager and hardener of the windows firewall. Which means it supports file-based rules. As well as protocol, port, IP and domain rules.

I guess I mistakenly took TinyWall's slogan ("A free, lightweight and non-intrusive firewall") at face value. But your clarification does make more sense.