Originally Posted by bastille-linux.org

What is it?

The Bastille Hardening program "locks down" an operating system, proactively configuring the system for increased security and decreasing its susceptibility to compromise. Bastille can also assess a system's current state of hardening, granularly reporting on each of the security settings with which it works.

Bastille currently supports the Red Hat (Fedora Core, Enterprise, and Numbered/Classic), SUSE, Debian, Gentoo, and Mandrake distributions, along with HP-UX. Full Mac OS X is in beta, ready for download today. Bastille's focuses on letting the system's user/administrator choose exactly how to harden the operating system. In its default hardening mode, it interactively asks the user questions, explains the topics of those questions, and builds a policy based on the user's answers. It then applies the policy to the system. In its assessment mode, it builds a report intended to teach the user about available security settings as well as inform the user as to which settings have been tightened.

Originally Posted by zinglebarb (Post 34144596)

ok the user then but you know what I ment I was generalising wasnt belittling you :)

Originally Posted by ADd (Post 34144602)

I have a friend who is running Xp with 500Mhz celeron and 256MB of ram. It has no issues, as long as unnecessary startup items are remove eg msn messenger, java etc. Winpatrol, or SPybot S & D can do this (spybot choose 'advanced' mode)

They use Jetico firewall, winpatrol, AVG,
Zonealarm is somewhat resource hungry, so Sunbelt Kerio might be a better bet.

Originally Posted by ADd (Post 34144612)

Sunbelt Kerio is now at Version: 4.3.268. Yes it does use resources, but the boot-time is quicker than Zonealarm on the slower systems I have tried it on. Jetico is one of the lightest, but as I have commented before, it is very user intensive.

Best thing to do is trial the firewalls on the system, with your internet manually removed - see how the boot times are, and go for the one you like as a user

Originally Posted by dragon (Post 34144615)

Whats the latest kerio like for user friendlyness?

Boottime doesnt matter tbh can always go off and wait for it to load up its how responcive the system is once booted thats more important.

Originally Posted by Gareth (Post 34144604)

Sort of off topic, but just wanted to post this for Dragon (and any other *nix users), when you do decide to give Linux another go, have a look at Bastille - www.bastille-linux.org [bastille-linux.org].


As for the original topic, I think others have already posted what I was going to say... except maybe considering Outpost Firewall. There's a free version which has received very good reviews, although it isn't the most easiest/user-friendly to configure but once it's running it's supposedly very effective. More info... http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpostfree/index.php [agnitum.com]

Originally Posted by dragon (Post 34144605)

Know of a good distro Zingle? I'd be perticuarly interested in one thats package management system/repositories contains a wide selecteion and is regularly updated I find most of them don't have the current versions of a lot of software and manually updating usally throws me into depedancy hell.

On my home machine I dont really want to have to faff about trying to grab several librires and install stuff from source just to be able to get a media player updated for example... (i usally manage to screw something up).

Its about time they relised that if they want more people to use linux then pretty graphical installers or the mac drag n drop, your done meathord is the way to go.

Originally Posted by Gareth (Post 34144634)

We should really fork this question into its own new thread, but here goes anyway...

From your criteria above, I think you should give Ubuntu a whirl (or Kubuntu - the same distro but using the prettier KDE desktop manager). It uses the Debian APT package management which is nice and easy to use - no dependency hell any more - and if you use Synaptic it's got a good GUI front end, although the apt command is straight forward enough anyway.

The advantage over other distros is that the packages seem to be updated more frequently - esp compared to Debian, which it's based on.

Check out the docs - https://help.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/deskt...e/C/index.html [ubuntu.com] - and see if you think you could get by with it. Then either download it for free or request they send you the latest DVD (also for free :)).

HTH

Originally Posted by Gareth (Post 34144984)

Apologies in advance if this is an insulting question... Did you power down the modem after trying the lappy and before trying the NIC? Because of the different MAC addresses between the different devices, you'd need to reboot the modem for it to recognize the NIC.

If so, then I'd agree... sounds like a knackered NIC.