Zone Alarm 10.x Interfering w/SageTV?

[wacole]

Hello,

Several days ago I noticed that SageTV began recording shows with much pixilation and many drop outs. As shows recorded prior to that date were playing back OK, I ruled out my HD300 and the SageTV software as culprits and started on a hardware hunt. I use HDHomeRun as my capture device and tried their HDQuickTV tuner which showed that the signal from the antenna was seemingly OK. However when running "Watch TV" from w/in SageTV, I got pixilation, etc. and lots of rotating wheel things. I wasn't sure what to make of this.

As I have a couple of antenna amplifiers in my antenna path [I do OTA] I thought that maybe one or both had developed problems; after all they had been running 24x7 for three years. So I replaced one and tried it viewing shows again. The amplifier worked fine and could watch shows in HDQuickTV OK but still had major SageTV problems - in fact SageTV slowed to a crawl, taking for ever to re-draw screens and leaving me in the rotating [jerkily] wheel mode forever. What is causing this? I opened the task manager, brought up processes and lo and behold vsmon.exe, the ZoneAlarm engine, was sucking up 98% and up of the CPU cycles. After I shut ZA down [it dies hard] SageTV viewing worked just fine, though now I'm w/out a firewall.

Has anyone else run into this? I've used ZA w/SageTV for a long time w/o issue but this new release is not working for me. [I did an upgrade of ZA not a new install.] Before I report this to Checkpoint, was curious to know if anyone else had had this problem.

Thanks very much,

Bill Cole

[BobPhoenix]

I personally don't use a firewall on my SageTV server it is headless and the only browsing on it is done through the user interface so I don't feel that I need one. My whole network system is behind a router with a firewall on it so I think that is sufficient protection for my servers. My laptop and my desktop are different matters. I have antivirus on them as well as using a firewall.

[GKusnick]

I don't have an answer for your ZoneAlarm issue, other than to wonder why anyone bothers with ZoneAlarm anymore now that inexpensive firewall routers are available.

[wacole]

Thanks very much for the firewall advice; I'd be happy to ditch ZA. I have a Linksys WRT54G router and have looked at some web pages that discuss how to configure Linksys routers as a firewall. Several of them recommend not using the builtin firewall services as "they are difficult to configure" properly.

I recognize that this isn't the proper place to discuss this topic and understand if a reply is not allowed here, however I would appreciate knowing a good site to visit that would be able to help me determine if the router I have can be suitably configured with firewall services and, if so, what settings to use.

Thanks again for your help.

[david1234]

Originally Posted by wacole

Thanks very much for the firewall advice; I'd be happy to ditch ZA. I have a Linksys WRT54G router and have looked at some web pages that discuss how to configure Linksys routers as a firewall. Several of them recommend not using the builtin firewall services as "they are difficult to configure" properly.

Your router should work as a firewall right out of the box. Unless you've changed the configuration (other than that password of course), it's doing everything you need a firewall to do.

I think you will be fine turning off Zonealarm and any anti-virus you have on your server.

[wacole]

Thanks all. Have upgraded the firmware on my router. Just using the router's default firewall settings and have removed ZA. All is well.

Regards,

[ccsmoke]

I also turn off Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) on the router. UPnP allows an application to open up ports automatically which is useful for games but rouge programs can also take advantage of it. Best practice is just manually port forwarding.