Zone Alarm and home LANs don't mix

Just a friendly heads up for those of you who haven't learned the hard way yet about firewalls, routers and LANs. I put a couple posts on here about not being able to get my 2 computers at home to talk to each other to share resources by connecting them through a DSL router/modem in one. I could get to the internet but could not ping anything but the loopback. I am running win2k pro on both. I found the problem. I knew to check all of the firewalls. This includes firewall options that may be built into your ethernet adapter, a personal firewall or even the firewall on your router. Well, I made sure that all of the firewalls were off and disabled. I didn't even have the firewall programs on my PCs running! I decided to do one last thing. I decided to actually uninstall Zone Alarm from my computer, and that solved the problem. Even having the firewall on Zone Alarm turned off for Internet and Trusted Zones did not work cause I tried to reinstall it and try those properties again. The only thing that allowed my computers to connect to each other on the LAN and allow them to ping was removing Zone Alarm completely from the system. Even if Zone Alarm wasn't booted up, just having it installed on the PC prevented it from communicating with anything but the internet. I hope this helps someone out there from getting a headache from something this trivial like I did.

 

Im sorry to here that, I have been using ZA free and Pro for almost 6 years and have incorporated it into dozens of networks. I think maybe keeping ZA up and ensuring that your IP range/subnet was in the trusted zone might have accomplished the same thing, Then again I was not there to see the symptoms.

 

Thanks for the info, but I tried adding hosts, IPs, subnets, etc. into the advanced screen of the firewall and that didn't fix my problem either. I wish I could get it to work like that. Maybe I configured it wrong. I like ZA a lot. Bummer.