Re: BlackIce firewall from ISS - Is it a POS?

Arnie wrote:
My wife has been running BlackIce on her computer (Windows) and about a month ago she started having troubles. CD burn errors, slow copying of files and general system slowdown. I checked the performance graph in Task Manager and the CPU usage was spiking from a few percent to 50%, up and down like a yoyo when the system was idle. I narrowed the culprit down to the firewall, BlackIce. When I disabled it's services and removed it from the startup folder everything was normal again. I've discovered that she can still use it although if the GUI is loaded (which puts an icon in the system tray) the spiking returns. Right-click on the icon and choose 'exit' and the spiking stops (although the BlackIce services are still running and hence the firewall is fully functional). Now a month later if you open the GUI the CPU usage starts spiking from a couple % up to 90%. It's getting worse.
ISS (who produce BlackIce) tout themselves as the world's greatest security experts but this program (at least the GUI part of it which is minimal anyway) is behaving like a badly written piece of sh|t.
Anyone got any ideas what is wrong? Or suggestions for a better firewall?
I won't touch Norton junk (too intrusive, registry bloat etc.) and I had trouble with Zone Alarm years ago on Win98. When I uninstalled it, it trashed the registry on the way out.
Thanks for any advice

Arnie

Why don't you call ISS about your problem with BI or send an email, as there could be a solution.

You do know that you can go to MSconfig to the Start-up tab and disable the BI GUI from running with the Windows O/S.

With the services still running for BI, which is the FW part of BI, you can use VisualIce (free), use goggle, to view the log entries, which will have the same information that would be displayed in the Intrusion Detection screen of attacks in the BI GUI, which VI will have even more information being displayed to you than the BI GUI screens, based on the logs.

You can also set VisualIce to start up minimized, sound an alert, flash its icon, down in the job trey, when an attack happens.

You have to enable BI's via it's GUI for logging to capture the logs that VI will use.

You can damn near tell BI to do anything from the BI configuration files and you don't need the BI GUI to do it. You need the BI GUI up only for some type of configuration of BI visually, but you don't have to have the BI GUI running all the time, with its icon sitting down there in the job trey.

There is also an ISS forum where you can post questions about BI too, for support.


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