Product Reviews

The growing number of personal firewall products can only be good news for home users, as they can now protect their PCs from Internet-based intruders at a price they can sensibly afford. Furthermore, as home ADSL installations become more common, it's imperative that some form of protection is implemented, as these Always On connections leave users wide open to attack.

Recently, we've looked at the Sphinx Personal Firewall (reviewed issue 79, p200) and BlackICE Defender (reviewed issue 78, p169) and have been impressed by the number of features offered by both of these budget-priced products. TermiNET is another personal firewall that aims to offer the same protection at a similarly low price.

Initial impressions are that TermiNET is more complex than BlackICE Defender, but it does add access control functions that could prove useful in a home environment. Installation only takes a few minutes, and TermiNET automatically defaults to the Stealth mode. This permits outgoing traffic but will block all incoming connections that weren't initiated by the host PC. If you wish, you can immediately block all inbound and outbound traffic by selecting the Closed mode and then open up access to specific services. Alternatively, the Open mode permits all traffic in either direction, after which you can close down applications or services as required.

If the Stealth mode is selected, TermiNET immediately starts protecting your PC. An icon is placed in the System Tray for easy access to the configuration screen, and this is protected by an administrator password. The main interface is a tidy affair that's split into three sections showing the various security settings that have been applied.

TermiNET uses rules to determine what type of Internet traffic is allowed through, and a default set of four global rules is automatically applied to allow Web access, SMTP and POP3 email, Telnet and file transfers. More rules can be created for other predefined applications including chat, news and PING, and control can be tightened further by implementing advanced rules. To add a new rule, you choose an application and decide whether it should be blocked, allowed or left inactive for later use. You can then decide

ADVERTISEMENT

whether this is to be applied to incoming or outgoing traffic by selecting the Client or Server mode, and each rule can be made active on specific days.

You'll also need to select the appropriate protocols and port numbers, but this is where TermiNET falls down badly: the documentation and online help are woefully inadequate. Home users shouldn't be expected to know about TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol), but Danu Industries makes no effort to enlighten them. Also, if you opt to create custom rules, you'll need to know which port numbers must be specified to control incoming traffic from remote systems, but no light is shed on this subject.

Password-protected user profiles determine what Internet services can be accessed, and this may be useful in situations where a home PC and its Internet connection is used by different family members. A profile could be created to allow full Internet access to, say, the head of the household, while other family members can be blocked from using services such as chat facilities. Global black-and-white lists can also be implemented to override rules and allow or deny access to specific Web sites.

Warning notification of blocked traffic is limited to a screen that pops up every time TermiNET picks up some dubious traffic, although it only needs the slightest excuse to appear; I switched this feature off after a few minutes as it became irritating. Logging is extensive, as details of all allowed or blocked traffic is maintained globally and for each user. Unfortunately, there's no option to customise what information is displayed, so the file fills up extremely quickly. Realistically, there's no need to know about traffic that's been allowed through, and TermiNET produced 14 pages of mainly useless information within two hours of being installed on my ADSL-equipped test system. You can limit the amount of disk space the log file is allowed to use but, once this has been filled, TermiNET overwrites the oldest entries so it's virtually impossible to maintain any history of attempted attacks.

For the price, TermiNET certainly looks good value and is a lot easier to use than Sphinx, so is more suitable for the average home user. Using rules and different user profiles to control access on an individual basis will appeal to many homes, but the lack of decent help won't make this a simple task. Danu did advise me that the next version will come with improved documentation and Wizard-based help for the majority of tasks. Even so, TermiNET will have to go some way before it challenges BlackICE Defender, as this offers far more features plus sophisticated back-tracking facilities, and is one of the most intuitive and helpful personal firewall products currently on the market.