NeT Firewall

NeT Firewall is a comprehensive firewall application that comes bundled with numerous advanced configuration settings meant to boost the operating system's protection from all kinds of threats. It can be configured as a personal or server firewall, and it's geared toward expert users, such as network administrators.

The app's packed in a user-friendly interface based on a large window with a neatly organized structure, where you can explore all main components in a tree view when it comes to the network interfaces, network traffic capabilities, security rules, active connections, the packet log, and network aliases. Although this is not mentioned, the main window gets minimized to the systray.

NeT Firewall shows information on all network interfaces, including their MAC and IP addresses, MTU, and speed. You can adjust the security level for each adapter, as well as examine traffic history with the incoming and outgoing packets, in addition to the current maximum rate.

It's possible to instruct the local area network to use separate sets of IP addresses for internal and external traffic, control network traffic to optimize or guarantee performance, low latency and the bandwidth, as well as tinker with the IP routing table for directly forwarding traffic.

For the last mentioned option, you can inspect a list with the current IP addresses when it comes to the destination, mask, gateway and interface, remove any routing entry from the list, as well as add new ones with user-defined parameters.

Security rules can be put together by filling out common details, namely the rule description, ID number (used for prioritization), network interface, rule type (allow or deny packets), control directions (only for incoming or outgoing packets, or both), and protocol (choose from a list, custom, or any). It's also necessary to indicate the source and destination IP addresses and ports.

NeT Firewall lets you investigate currently running TCP and UDP connections, namely the process name, protocol, local and remote IP address and port number, along with the status.

It's possible to refresh the list, terminate selected processes, trace routes and resolve host names, create new firewall rules for selected connections, or open the packet log to find out the source and destination IP address and port number, protocol, number, time first, time last, and reason for each incoming or outgoing connection. Meanwhile, network aliases can be seamlessly established for subnets.

The software application enables you to save information to file (TXT, CSV) when it comes to the network interfaces, traffic abilities, security rules, active connections, the packets log, and network aliases.

You can add or remove any columns from display, hide the console tree, action and view menus, standard toolbar, status bar, and taskpad navigation tabs, show the description bar and action pane, save rules to .rul format to import them later, set the firewall engine to automatically run at Windows startup, disable DNS and TCP inspection, as well as enable logging to a disk file.

Surprisingly, the tool has minimal impact on computer performance in our tests. It committed firewall changes instantly and didn't hang, crash or prompt error messages. Although the interface is pretty plain, NeT Firewall features a practical set of firewall configuration options for users who know what they're doing. Too bad that it hasn't been updated for a long time.