Recommended Software – Ghostwall Personal Firewall

I just found this small personal firewall yesterday while i was searching for an update for the ProcX program. Although in the end i did not get an update for ProcX, i found another good personal firewall (freeware) named Ghostwall by Ghostsecurity

At first i did not believe that there was a personal firewall with only 656 KB because all personal firewall i have tried before have at least of 10MB filesize, and that’s just the setup file before the original program uncompressed

And at last i decided to download and install this small firewall and tested it right away by using online port checking from Gibson Research Corporation website. And i get this result :

Your system has achieved a perfect “TruStealth” rating. Not a single packet — solicited or otherwise — was received from your system as a result of our security probing tests. Your system ignored and refused to reply to repeated Pings (ICMP Echo Requests). From the standpoint of the passing probes of any hacker, this machine does not exist on the Internet. Some questionable personal security systems expose their users by attempting to “counter-probe the prober”, thus revealing themselves. But your system wisely remained silent in every way. Very nice.

But i also get the same result even if i disable Windows Firewall, Ghostwall, or other firewall software. And that’s because my router does the job very fine :D

But since i really interested on testing this program … i tested it by opening a port on my computer that was used by Torrent to accept incoming connection and the results are (windows firewall disabled, beside i don’t use windows firewall) …

1. With Ghostwall Enabled (Torrent Incoming Port Allowed) : There’s no problem at all from other to connect to my computer, and the GRC website also says that the port used by Torrent on my computer is open
2. With Ghostwall Enabled (Torrent Incoming Port Blocked but the port is open) : Ghostwall successfully blocked everything that tries to connect through the open port used by Torrent (including the online port test)

And from the result i can see that this firewall worked as it should … and i tried another test by sending ICMP Echo Request known as Ping with the same condition like above … and yet another success

And the last thing i do is check, how much memory Ghostwall use. And suprisingly this program only use 1 MB of memory (checked via task manager and other similar program like task manager). Beside the highest amount of memory used by this program when i do the above test is only as small as 2.6 MB

So what is the final result ? … well … this personal firewall worked as it should, and it’s not a resource hog … and best of all it is free ! so i’d recommend this program to anyone who’s searching for small personal firewall without any other bloated stuff included