Sygate - Very Strong Firewall

[Massada]

Hello Guys -

This is my first post here. This is a very nice site with good users so I sent my donation into to support it. 

My ten cents on firewalls is that Sygate Personal (Free) and Sygate Professional firewall are worth checking out. They are far better than programs like ZoneAlarm for knowledgeable users. The Sygate Free verssion is kept updated and more than adequate for the majority of users. I made a decision to use Sygate over Outpost some time back and have never encountered anything to make me regret it.

[mouser]

i consistently hear good things about sygate, and it's definitely good product, and has some very nice displays of activity if i remember correctly.
when we started reviewing we didn't spend as much time on competitor products as we do now, otherwise we surely would have talked about sygate.

i can't remember exactly where i felt sygate fell short - if i remember correctly it was the ease in customizing rules at the time of the alert.  when i get an inbound or outbound alert i want to be able to say "configure" this rule and then be able to customize ports, direction, ips, etc. from the next screen, and i think at the time sygate wasn't good at letting me do that; im not 100% sure though, and/or it may have been improved by now.

comparison of free vs. pro features and more info: http://smb.sygate.co...spf/summary_pspf.htm
(looks to me like the personal is too crippled to be useful so you'll have to go with pro version if you want this)

[Scott]

 
I have a somewhat different perspective.

Sygate fares very poorly in these outbound tests:

http://firewallleaktester.com/tests.htm

And there has been an issue with Sygate mysteriously accessing secondary hard drives for years now:

http://forums.sygate...ad.php?threadid=4298
http://forums.sygate...d.php?threadid=10367

(Obviously not an issue for you if you don't have a secondary hard drive.)

Just being a pain in the ass, as usual.
 
 

[Sentinel]

With the recent buyout of Sygate by Symantec, I doubt the future for Sygate Personal Firewall Pro is very certain.  Or at least not in its current form.  Symantec will most likely be after Sygate's Enterprise solutions and anything that doesn't fit with this model is likely to either be discontinued or dumbed down and included in some kind of consumer targetted 'Security Suite'.

Only time will tell if I'm right or not...

[Carol Haynes]

Anyone else feeling Symantec is just getting too damn big.

I'm really frustrated - I moved to Sygate Pro and NOD32 (both excellent products IMHO) to get away from Symantec bloatware, but I guess I'll have to move on again soon if they do their usual trick with Sygate.

Anyone else notice that since they took over Powerquest all the old products (Partition Magic etc) have had little or no development.

[Sentinel]

Carol, I agree with you completely.  In fact, I intended to write a short response to this thread which somehow ended up being several pages in length with my frustrations towards Symantec as an end user.  Thinking it through, it made an ideal Column piece to vent my frustrations though - So that is exactly what I intend to do in place of my planned piece.

For better or worse, here is the link to the relevant article: -

https://www.donation...e_symantec.html#more

Good luck and best wishes Sygate Firewall users.  It was an excellent product and I hope it remains that way.