CIS doesnt play nice, moving on to new firewall

Comodo Internet Security - CIS News / Announcements / Feedback - CIS
#1

Well I used to be very enthusiastic about the comodo firewall product.

I was tired of the memory hog I had with zone alarm and AVG.
So i searched for something to replace them, and ended up using only the comodo firewall pro, which suited both roles just fine. I pulled the old programs off two computers and redid them with CFP.

Well today Ive switched back to an older laptop and tried to do tha same change on it also, only I found a link for “comodo internet security”. Hmm well not the same name but maybe its just an upgrade.

Well this time when it asked if i wanted the toolbar, ( I always reject toolbars) I considered hmm safesurf, i was kinda missing a feature in the old programs that showed if a link was safe from google, maybe it will do that.

Well, I found it didnt do that, but was all about"click for shopping" etc, nothing I needed, I can find my own sites just fine. so I did some checking and uninstalled the toolbar thru add/remove. (Not only that, I clicked a link from a cooking related query on google and had one of those pop-ups come up telling me some or other “program” would protect me from some bad something or other… I havent seen one of those since I had CFP installed on my other computers! (I also run firefox and its fairly bullet proof).

Well, next i tried to go to my emails, and grab some simple text ini files that iu had emailed to myself fm the other computer because of my move- and mystifyingly, when i click the link in the yahoo email to grab a file to download it, it just sits there endlessly trying to virus scan a 2k text file. I tried closing the browser, and thought yahoo was on the fritz so sent them to my hotmail address instead. Ok, well the hotmail messages wont even OPEN.
BOTH hotmail and yahoo are on the fritz at the same time??
then it dawned on me it might be that new firewall, so i disabled it, nope didnt help, disabled all its features, tried exiting it, and terminating process, all nope.

Maybe i was being paranoid… went to my yahoo on a different computer with the perfectly normal CFP not CIS, and voila, file scanned perfectly in under a second, ready to download. I didnt even bother to test hotmail, since it was obvious the problem was the CIS software.

Oh I forgot to mention I was sort of annoyed that while i was installing it, I decided to go ahead and let it do the virus scan, so it would be able to use clean mode, and even tho this has a relatively tiny hard drive by todays standards, (and that half empty) the scan took 1 hour and 52 minutes. I finished a nap while i waited, after i got extremely bored waiting on it! I had the run the scan on one of the other computers when it was simply CFP and it did NOT take 2 hours, with them having roughly twice the size hard drive.

I shudder to think it would take 4 hours to run a scan before install if i had tried to put it on them!!

The program was all set on its default settings, and yet wont even allow me to access online email, and yet didnt have a problem letting thru one of those annoying pop up ads for a so-called virus program…

score: zero on all counts.

I made a full uninstall, and now Im off to hunt for yet another firewall program that is affordable on a tight budget yet works decently while allowing me to actually use the programs I already have an use.

[s](Note there was NO alert telling me it was stopping me from using my hotmail and download feature of yahoo, it just stopped it without saying a thing. I even looked at the “event” lists to see what it said about those times, and what it thought it was protecting me from, but alas, there was no record whatsoever of this action it took without asking if i wanted it to do that.)

No more pro-comodo for me. Thats a bit more “secure” than I was interested in being , thank you. I had returned to the site hoping to find “just” the firewall version, but fruitlessly, since it has apparently been absorbed into this clunker they call “security”. Nothing like being saved from myself. Thanks, but no thanks.[/s]

** edit whoops! my bad. see follow up post

#2

not for anything but, you could have just installed just the firewall portion and nothing else. CIS gives you the option of installing the FW, D+ and the AV. All three, two or one.

Ice

#3

I agree with Icecube and ontop of that…

Hello Areyanna, Welcome to the forums.
Did you try the newest version of CIS? it should be *.432 which speeds up scanning on certain files.
Also, It’s possible that there are conflicts with other programs if your running other security applications.

You could also check your logs - Comodo → Defense+\Firewall\Antivirus → Events.
Safe Surf is to give you protection from buffer overflow attacks.

++Since you tested it out on a different computer doesn’t give an accurate example because the enviroment was different.

You don’t need to do the scan prior to install, You can install and then later scan\ Switch to clean pc when you want to.

#4

I agree with Kyle.

However, COMODO should change the installer scanner to the real AV scanner.

Areyanna >> two different environments cannot give accurate results. Please, give COMODO another chance, download the latest version, update the definitions…trust me it is worth it!!!

(S)

#5

I can understand the frustration. I am running CIS, the firewall & Defense options, and Avira Free.

My system occasionally has a stall when I delete a file, or rightclick a larger archive file.
If i disable Avira it improves. If I disable Avast it improves (tried separately).

But when having e.g. Task Manager or Process Explorer or System Explorer on the side… I’m missing the option in CIS to turn off Comodo’s cmdagent.exe scanning feature, since CFP v3 even. I’m sure that could be another and preferred option because I only chose to install the firewall and the Defense+ components and not the AV component.

#6

Hey Bam, you can’t turn off what isn’t there :wink:
CFP doesn’t have a scanner… CIS has the AV, not CFP. You can disable Defense+\firewall if you need to though.

#7

Well… wasnt entirely expecting to come back =)

But I have to apologize, i jumped the gun. =/
I hate when I set up new or redo a computer, theres so many things you change at once its hard to track which change actuually created your problem. I know its ideal to only install one new thing at a time, but when bringing a machine up to speed, you have many updates to do at once.

That problem did seem A LOT like a firewall issue, though (to me).

But when CIS was all cleaned out and gone (and yes it was the newest one, i downloaded it that very day, and I did mention, I DID check the event log.) --the problem still was happening.

Well i had also updated that day to windows service pack 3, so I was about to uninstall that, when it brought up the warning that my version of firefox might not work if i did that… then it occured to me, I had also got a firefox update. So i checked on that first.

Looking at the firefox help, it recommended running in safe mode, and I found the mail worked! So by testing one thing at a time, I discovered it was one of my addons in firefox that was now incompatible with the latest patch to firefox.

I had forgotten i got that, since it wasnt a major version change (Im still running 2.X, not 3.X) it was just one of those with some security fixes. But that was indeed the problem and not the firewall. Should have looked closest to home first. (The other computer, I should have remembered, upgraded to firefox 3.X and I had to remove that same addon at that time because firefox announced it was incompatible with that addon. But, I thought that only applied to 3.X…oh well)

However that does sound interesting, to install only the firewall and not the internet security portion, I dont recall there being such an option while i loaded. Only an option to add safe surf & the toolbar. (Which I still dont want)

Also im not really sure what point you guys were trying to make about testing in another environment. If it in fact had not worked on my computer, it was rather irrelevant to me if it works on another computer, because, this is the computer I have, and last time I checked, people dont change computers just to make the firewall work -
You change the firewall to work with the computer you have.
Clearly it was working for someone, but if it wasnt in this situation…the rest dont matter (to me).
But that point is moot, since the firewall WASNT the thing that was misbehaving in that instance.

Now some of its other annoyances, which were minor, are still valid, but, definitely minor.

I havent had time to redownload and reinstall. Ill let you know if it misbehaves for me again!

I know it did say it had some sort of real time monitor, and I always turn those off, because I dont have the kind of computer power to still have programs work at a decent speed when every single thing is being intercepted and scanned when they are used.

I primarily use my browser and one mmorpg. I dont need for it to scan (or whatever it calls it) everything my game does every time it does it. Onlines games suffer enough lag as it is!

IMO, (in my unscientific and pretty well uneducated opinion) firewalls are there to catch new weird things that werent there before, popping up and doing things they shouldnt.
I dont want a nanny or food taster as it were, running interference on every file that opens 24/7.

/shrug. Just an opinion there.

thanks for the replies. Im actually relieved I dont have to hunt for a new program. Theres not alot of good free options out there. (free is really the only kind that works for me right now)
Im actually saying that on credit as it were, cause i havent reinstalled yet… =) but Im hoping it will be fine.

#8

Hmm actually looked closer at what you said… when i had previously used CFP, it also had those parts, and I did take the firewall, the defense plus and must have taken the AV because i know it scanned to start and i could do a scan on demand when i wanted.
The CIS seemed to have other portions as well, like the toolbar (yuck) and the “safesurf”.
I believe from what im understanding thats just a small tool to stop one particular hijink, as it were? (the buffer overflow). Seems like it has a rather large and visible presence to just do that. From the name I thought they were doing something to “prescreen” websites or weblinks.

Thats the only thing I miss from AVG. Since i use google multiple a times a day, its nice to know that a site isnt a dummy/boobytrapped site before i click it. I do see a number of sites that look normal in the google list, have relevant text quoted, but when you go there, it transforms to something else, usually some sort of sales or link farm thing. i dont always stick with google’s top ten because theres good info out there besides just the ones who know how to get top search engine placement. But im not all that thrilled with other search engines (nor am i the slightest interested in “asking jeeves”)

Still sort of bummed i cant just get the old version i was using with no problems up until I swapped to a different computer a couple days ago… (hey it was running on a dinosaur with only 256m ram, and didnt clog the system up, so it had to be decent.)

#9

Areyanna are you sure your browser hasn’t been hi-jacked?

When I use Google I never get to advert sites. That is not normal.

#10

I doubt its me. I came out clean in the comodo scan after all =) I periodically use various others too.
They are just sites that I think the domain ran out on, and what you end up with is a listing of related pages and ad kinda things. If you check enough pages on google, youll find them. They pretend to be related to your topic but they are just a link farm.

You cant just look at the top 3 links. You often have to go a couple pages into the list.

The one pop up ad thing, tho, that was definitely not normal for me.
The only issues my browser had was having that icky toolbar on it =P
Dont know what I was thinking, i hate toolbars. They exist for one reason- to add advertising to your browser.

I like my life commerical free, thank you.

#11

Hi Areyanna,

Do you have a hosts file such as MVPS?

That blocks a lot of ad sites.

#12

I dont use hosts files anymore. I did many computers ago… was somewhat of a pain… not up on it anymore.

However some people/places dont approve of some available ways to skip ads so i dont discuss my choice(s) much =)