Labs

There's a free version of Sygate Personal Firewall available, but this misses out on many of the Pro version's benefits: intrusion-detection features, anti-IP spoofing measures, advanced configuration, VPN (Virtual Private Network) support and technical support. It also limits the number of custom rules to 20, making it pretty useless for anything but the most basic use. Sygate Pro isn't useless, but it's 'not' a lot of things: not very user-friendly, with confusing options presented in a less than logical manner; not sealed tight by default, as it failed our port scanning test; and not bad at everything else.

The VPN connectivity is perhaps its best feature, working far better than any other software firewall in terms of transparency and working straight out of the box to enable VPN protocols to bypass the firewall. Unfortunately, Sygate lacks an automatic application scanning

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and configuration facility, so you have to feed it the information manually by replying to dialog boxes requesting permission or otherwise. The more technically savvy will appreciate the level of information provided by these dialog boxes, although everyone else will get horribly confused very quickly. There is, however, little in the way of guidance available to help if you do become terminally confused, making Sygate a rather dangerous weapon to play with in the wrong (by which read inexperienced) hands.

But then this is a tool aimed at the advanced user, the giveaway being little touches such as packet-capture detail in the logging, email alert functionality, anti-MAC spoofing (Ethernet adaptor identifier) and anti-IP spoofing as well. However, we suspect even the die-hard techie would tire pretty quickly of the tedious interface. And then just as you think all is lost, you discover another gem buried in there: Sygate automatically reconfigures itself for different specific networks, making it a dream if you use multiple Internet service providers, for example.

Contradiction is the name of the Sygate game, though: you get feature-rich logging but no simple way to search those logs, plus easy pop-up application prompts but no detailed information to enable an easy configuration choice. It's not a bad application, just a badly thought-out one. Given another couple of iterations, Sygate could become a force to be reckoned with, but for now it sadly isn't.