Re: Closing ports using Sygate

Duane Arnold wrote: 
louise wrote:

ohaya wrote:


tenplay wrote:

Greetings! I am a user of the free version of the Sygate Personal
Firewall. I was informed by the "Shields Up!!" security testing website
that I should close external access to Port 1025. Please give
instructions. Thank you. Mike 





Mike,

I don't think that that version of Sygate has a direct way to configure
which ports are open/listening, but if you go to Tools -> Application,
you'll get a window showing a list of applications.  If you then click
the "Advanced" button at the bottom of that window, you'll get another
window, and there are two radio buttons, "act as client" and "act as
server".

I think that when the "act as server" button is selected/enabled, the/a
port associated with the application is left open by Sygate.

For some reason that I've never understood, it seems like Sygate sets
both the "act as client" and "act as server" buttons set/enabled by
default, and you have to go in manually as I described above to shut
down potentially listening ports associated with applications.

Jim 


I have the Pro version of Sygate.

I've never been able to figure out what needs to "act as server" and what doesn't. How does one assess this? For example, an anti-spam program attached to Outlook or my AV or...anything that goes and looks for updates?

TIA

Louise


Any program/application running on your machine that initiates contact with a remote site *Acts as a Client*. Outlook acts as a client as it must initiate contact with the POP3 server in order to send and receive emails to/from the POP3 server.

If you had the Windows 2k Pro or XP Pro O/S with you running IRIS as the WEB server program, you wanted people/clients to access the WEB/FTP Site, you wanted the personal FW to accept unsolicited inbound connections (anyone on the Internet can connect and access your Web/FTP site) on port 80 HTTP Web or ports 20 and 21 for FTP, then IIS on the machine behind Sygate must be set to *Act as a Server* as that is a server program and it *serves* information to clients.

On the other hand, IE on your machine would be set to *Act as a Client* because IE must initiate contact to a Web server to access information on the Web server over the Internet.

In other words, if *Act as a Server* is set, all unsolicited inbound traffic will reach the program/application on the inbound port the application/program is listening on. If the setting is *Act as a Client*, then the program behind the PFW *must* initiate contact with the site before the PFW will allow inbound traffic back to the program on the inbound port the program is listening on - that's solicited traffic and the PFW is going to let that traffic through. If other inbound traffic comes from somewhere to the program on the port the program is listening on and was not solicited, that unsolicited inbound traffic is not solicited and is going to be blocked by the PFW.

99.9% of the programs running on your machine are client programs for Internet access and are making contact with server programs on the Internet. Server means it *serves* and client means it requests.

Duane :)

Thanks - that makes the whole thing make some sense and I can hopefully figure it out from here.

Louise
.