Norton Personal Firewall 2005 - Single User

Manufacturer:	Symantec
Release date:	23 September, 2004

Norton Personal Firewall 2005 - Single User

Average rating: Stars

Poorly documented, extremely unstable, impractical.

I'll try and stay fairly objective about this. It will be difficult. I installed this on a brand spanking new Win2K SP4 machine. Here is what I've experienced.

1. Poor to no support documentation for this product, either included or on their web site.

2. Default security policy is not adequate. I've installed server apps that the wizard interface said were reccomended safe, which I know darned well aren't. ( therefore requiring rule customization for the apps to work correctly)

3. Adding even basic firewall rules crashes this product, HARD.

4. Does not play well with others, when it does crash, it can 't be shut down or restarted with the task manager, causing a REQUIRED reboot.

5. I have crashed IE and had this product crash queitly without any alert, leaving my box exposed on the network.

6. No ability to configure perpetual logging. You are limited to 2 megs of their binary log format, so essentially all someone has to do to blast your logs off your box is DOS your for about a minute.

(You can take snapshots of the logs, but that still positions you to loose data, particularly in a DOS situation.)

7. Firewall rule base is not exportable, which means multiple hosts have to be indevidually configured. This fact alone makes it impractical in a small office environment.

8. The interface is badly obfuscated. No less than six clicks just to get to the rule base.

9. Their "Check my security" port scanner is bogus. Their port scanner only checks the lower 1024 ports, and depends on some sort of agent (which a good security policy would block anyway) to do the rest of the evaluation. So essentially you get a false "good" evaluation.

I'm in the IT business, and I explicitly DO NOT recommend this product to my customers. I will check amazon.com before purchasing anything from these folks again.

The only thing this product seems to do well is schill their 900 tech support phone number. But after all the time this product has wasted, I feel like they owe _me_ money.

Norton Personal Firewall 2005 - Single User - Symantec

What a waste of time and money

I don't recomend this product
after installing you need to activate it
this sounds easy enuff but is a hassle, after a few installs
Norton makes you call their tech suport to get activation numbers
and when I called, their server was down or something
so after push this push that wait on hold etc was told would have to call back again,
if you don't activate it then will work for just 15 days,
its a shame to pay for something that you can't use unless you have lots of time to waste

Symantec - Norton Personal Firewall 2005 - Single User

Disaster

After installing Firewall 2005 I could not access the internet. Punching through menu after menu on the tech. assistance line I came up with an option that directly addressed my problem, so I guess I'm not the only one. Two service calls later, trying to struggle through language difficulties with tech. reps. from India, I was sent an e-mail which assured me would cure all my problems. An hour and a half later the problem still wasn't cured.

I object to Symantec making their problem mine, so I returned the software.