I have used Comodo Firewall for a couple of months and so far I haven’t encountered any problems which couldn’t be solved with a logical approach. I have really liked the program and recommended it to lots of people. But this is completely dumbfounding. Since yesterday I have been trying to convince the firewall to allow me to watch a video stream from www.demoscene.tv. When I set the security level to “allow all”, it works. Otherwise not. At first I just followed their recommendations regarding opened ports and so on, but no luck. After I while I noticed that the video stream came through when I turned off the network control rules. OK, so the problem must be in how the rules are set up, I thought. But after several hours I must conclude that it doesn’t have anything to do with the rules themselves. With the network control rules tab set to “turn on”, the video stream is blocked, no matter how the rules look!
My usual ruleset with the correct ports open and the usual block-all rule at the bottom = doesn’t work.
My usual ruleset with the correct ports open and no block-all rule at the bottom = doesn’t work.
All traffic explicitly allowed = doesn’t work.
No rules at all = doesn’t work.
That’s right, the rule list completely empty. With the rule list turned off, it works. Turn it on and the stream cuts off immediately. Turn it off again, and the video starts buffering and then resumes. No other network problems detected. Nothing under Activity/Logs, because no rules were violated! I have also changed the settings under Advanced Attack Detection And Prevention, setting them to allow as much as possible (since I read in another post that these settings have priority over the network rules), but nothing helps. When I set the UDP Flood traffic rate really low, it cuts off the video stream as it is misdetected as a flood attack. But at least that gets noticed under Activity/Logs, and when I change it back to a higher value, the video stream works again. Until I turn on the (for the moment empty) rule list… I really hope someone can spread some light over this absurd behaviour.