ZONE Alarm's blocking network activity

I finally got my wireless networking cards through UPS and installed them today. I have satellite internet so I made sure that I had a firewall. I use the free version of Zone Alarm, but today is one of the first times I have been having troubles with it, and they have been so serious I had to close my firewall just so I could ask this question. I have two computers on my network now. The Office computer is the one that is being used to connect to the satellite service. But I was unable to sign onto aol, aim or use internet explorer until I disabled the firewall. I thought just adding one of the messages that it was sending up into the trusted zone would fix it, but it seems that my Office Computer has many different source ips that it likes to go by. They are very much alike eachother though. Is there any way that I can tell my firewall program to allow anything coming from the Office computer and the other computer to be let through? I tried but all I could find was allowing ip adresses.. not just names of a source. Thank you for your time. I hope you can help!

 

**** Alarm

I personally hate Zone Alarm because of this reason, to many fulks going on from time to time, To this day I am amazed at how many of these personal software firewalls have come out, truthfully your best bet is to acquire a hardware firewall, which are not cheap, or build a new computer, cheap one, and put linux on it and configure it as a firewall, placing it between your two systems and the cable modem/whatever you have. Either one will work fine for what your looking for, now this depends on how you are accessing your systems at home from work?

 

I'm a little confused here. Are all the PCs you speak of on the same LAN and in the same location?

Do you have the IP ports needed for those services open to allow traffic? For instance, http (normal web browser stuff) needs to have port 80 open. FTP needs 20 & 21.

A pretty good general list of ports with other information is Here.

If your problem is partly with your internal PCs not being able to talk, you should be able to assign them static IP addresses and allow those addresses free access thru your firewall.

 

More info, map out how everything is