[SOLVED] Which Firewall for my needs?

[rugupiruvu]

Hi,
I am looking for a firewall which suits my needs. I have read many comparisons and have also tried about 5 firewalls without finding the right one. What should my firewall do?

- let me easy specify which specific IP or IP-range is blocked per application - i often don't want to block the whole application
Pop-up-options like (Block whole Application, block only port, block only this IP) would be awesome
- have an import/export feature for the configurations and rules
(- in the best case: be free ;-) . Ads are okay for me)
(- i don't need any "trash"-features)

A few years ago I had the Sunbelt Personal Firewall, but it is outdated (2011) and doesnt support x64

Thank you for your time and help

 

[bill001g]

Your best bet is like a inexpensive dual nic pc running the free pfsense firewall. In general it does not take much cpu power and is mostly related to how much traffic is passing. It also need not much memory or disk and can use the onboard graphics on the cpu.

It all depends what you mean "application". Almost all traffic is now encrypted. All you will see are ip addresses and port numbers. You can easily block any combination of ports or ip. What you can't do for example is see what is being searched on google. You might be able to tell it is a google search page but even that is hard to say for sure.

Firewall content filtering is getting rather impracticable now days. IP addresses mean very little when everything runs from google or microsoft data centers. With DNS encryption being put in windows soon with a patch there will be no way to tell which site is being accessed. When you have a single IP that represent many different web sites and you can't see the actual URL your filtering is going to be fairly brute force if you use IP addresses.

 

[SamirD]

That first requirement is something common in enterprise equipment. That being said, even used enterprise equipment isn't cheap.

But there is sophos that you can download and use for free at home that should be sufficient as long as you gie it good enough hardware to run on.