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Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

> It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network.

I don't know glasswire, but on Commodo firewall you can set a rule to allow access to your local network by default (or any range of IPs) and ask about external access, which would be a way to solve your problem with explorer.

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Yeah I should probably look into it more. Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus? What I needed from Glasswire was click-to-allow on each network access, I couldn't find that in any product I tried a few years ago before I decided on Glasswire.

> Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus?

Yep, just pick the firewall from the installers and make sure you uncheck everything except the firewall during the install (they are tricky, these guys):

* https://forums.comodo.com/news-announcements-feedback-cis/co...

after installing go through and (again) disable everything but the firewall. I also use their firewall to block their firewall (hah) from updating. Once you do this it works fine as a standalone firewall and the only reason to ever update it is if you reinstall or upgrade Windows.

EDIT: It does per-app blocking great; that's why I use it. I tried glasswire and didn't like it (or maybe they wanted to charge me money, I forget).

You might enjoy Safing's Portmaster Firewall then: https://safing.io/

It's open source and is quickly surpassing GlassWire's capabilities.

Disclaimer: I'm Founder/CTO of Safing.

I am a bit confused about Portmaster and Safing. The documentation on Safing constantly refers to Portmaster. Does portmaster do anything besides act as a local firewall?

There are 3 big parts:

- The firewall itself with rules, filter lists, and so on - https://safing.io/features/

- Secure DNS (DoT/DoH resolver) - https://safing.io/features/

- "SPN": Optional paid VPN alternative similar to Tor, our source of revenue - https://safing.io/spn/

I'm pretty sure you can actually configure the windows firewall the same way, but you would have to it up front, instead of having it prompt you.

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