Help with ZoneAlarm Firewall Systems

[redwood973]

Can anyone help me with my firewall system? If it came with an instruction manual I have lost it, and now I am needing so help with it.

Under Program Control what does the "Access: Trusted," "Access: Internet," "Server: Trusted," and "Server Internet" all mean.

Thanks for your time.

[Balok]

Trusted refers to computers that you trust not to be a source of malicious data.

Internet refers to those computers generally part of the Internet, that you don't trust.

You assign a computer to a zone by entering its IP address (or range of IP addresses). Go to the 'Firewall' page and then the 'Zone' tab and use online help for instructions.

Access refers to a transaction in which your computer is (broadly speaking) a client, accessing a server. A web browser examining a standard page functions in this mode: it makes an HTTP request, and the server responds with an HTTP reply. (Technical bit: This normally means the program wants to open a socket -- or equivalent artifact in whatever comm stack you're using -- to communicate with a specific other machine.)

Server refers to a transaction in which your computer is supplying the data in response to someone else's request. This is a rare occurrence on desktop machines. One example would be peer to peer file sharing clients like KaZaa. (Technical bit: this normally means the program wants to open a socket -- or equivalent artifact in whatever comm stack you're using -- to listen for incoming requests.)

As I hope I've made clear, the distinction is based on who initiates the request, and who attempts to satisfy it.

So, Access:Trusted would be checked if you wanted to allow the program to access any computer you designated as Trusted (make requests of that computer and receive replies from it). And so on. It would be set to '?' if you wanted to be asked each time. And it would be set to 'X' if you wanted to prevent the program from ever successfully making such a request (this will, of course, cause some programs to fail).

Unless you know *exactly* what they are doing, beware of programs that seek to access the Internet as servers.

Hope this helps. If not, ask additional questions and I will try to answer them.

[redwood973]

Thanks Fesarius. Computers are not really my thing. Now that I have an idea of what that stuff is, I am thinking about just clearing the whole list of programs and starting over. I assume doing so would not hurt anything, right?