Editor's (Updated) Mini-Review for BlackICE Defender Firewall Software

I've been using BlackICE Defender software for a several months. This program blocks and alerts you to hackers probing your system. Very informative. I discovered that I was being probed regularly (on average once every two days), even though I was using dynamic IP addressing via an ISP dialup account.

My only installation problem was a necessity to edit its .ini (initialization) file to inhibit its penchant for rebooting upon thinking it detected new hardware. It was not practically usable until I made this change, because everytime I dialed with my ISDN modem it rebooted the system. This is a simple enough change for someone comfortable with computers, once you figure out that is the problem and solution, but I should not have had to do this.

I recently discovered a major incompatibility between BlackICE and PGP Network Security S/W. I installed the latter for its PGPnet VPN S/W for use in accessing a H/W VPN box from PGP, the E-ppliance 50 (the subject of a future review). Unfortunately for BlackICE, the PGP Network Security S/W comes with it's own intrustion detection S/W. These two intrusion detection packages do not co-exist -- big time -- as in the blue screen of death on boot. Fortuneately, I had GoBack installed on the machine in question and was able to undo the PGP S/W install, then uninstall BlackICE, and then reinstall the PGP S/W.

See:
http://www.networkice.com/products/
soho_solutions.html

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