Free Software and Responsibility
Posted in General, Software Reviews, Support Calls on March 16th, 2005I love free software, I mean who doesn’t? Free software is all over the place. I use it for instant messaging, surfing the web, firewall, etc. The problem I run into is when the free software breaks things on your machine, for example, other software applications that might break after a free software install or upgrade. Who is responsible? The software that is now broken? The maker of the free software that you think broke the other application? No one? The user? Ultimately I believe it is the user because they need the broken app fixed. If you decide to engage either software company they start the ‘blame game’ and start blaming the other software maker, so taking this step is more of a delay than getting your problem resolved. So the best step, I feel is to take the bull by the horn and try and solve it yourself. I’ll give you a great example of something that happened to me that sparked me to write this article up.
I use free firewall software for my home pc’s simply because they do the job I need them to do and it makes no sense for me to pay for it. I don’t like the Windows Firewall because it’s too basic and does not offer me the flexibility that the other free firewall apps currently on the market do (ZoneLabs, Sygate, etc.).
Diana and I use Sygate Firewall. It, IMO, is better than ZoneLabs ZoneAlarm product because of the firewall rule flexibility and the great logging capabililties included (especially the packet capture/logging). This allows me to troubleshoot potential firewall blocking issues without the need to break out a separate packet capture utility. Anyway, I recently upgraded to a newer version of Sygate (5.6). I thought it worked great because I had no problems afterward - all I did was connect back up to the internet and surf the net for a bit. No issues. Now, this was on Diana’s laptop. I did the same on mine - no issues. Well, Diana came home last night and tried to vpn into her work. The client she uses for her work is Cisco VPN Dialer 3.6.1. Sure enough, that thing was broke. We tested on her other machine (a desktop) and it worked just fine. So, we isolated it to just her little laptop that I had just upgraded to Sygate 5.6. So, I checked everything that I could to ensure that the firewall was not blocking a packet in her vpn connection - nothing noted. Then, I checked the vpn software to see if it came with any debugging or logging software that would let me know more about what was happening other than the error that we were getting - which stated that the local firewall policy did not match that of the remote vpn server. So, I found the vpn logger, which comes as part of Cisco VPN Dialer solution. I ran that application and it was logging an enrty every second stating that the Cisco firewall failed to start. I had my root cause as to why the Cisco VPN Dialer was no longer working, now I just needed a fix. So, I started digging. I checked Cisco’s site. Nothing found. I checked google. Nothing found. I then checked Sygate’s forum. Thank goodness! I found something there.
The solution to the problem was to remove Sygate and install Zone Alarm. Crazy answer, but true. I tried the other solutions mentioned but this was the only one that worked. I noticed early on in my troubleshooting that Cisco makes note in their vpn dialer software that the firewall is licensed from ZoneLabs ;however, I did not think to download and install ZoneAlarm until I read it in the forum. After all, I had already uninstalled Sygate, uninstalled the Cisco VPN Dialer and reinstalled it. I had also performed several additional steps like disabling my a/v software and other windows features that I thought my be killing the vpn client but to no avail.
So, once I installed a version of ZoneAlarm and reran the Cisco VPN Dialer (I did not even have to reinstall the Cisco VPN Dialer afterwards), everything worked like a champ! Very interesting and yet another notch on the belt! Now, I can call my wife and tell her that her trouble ticket (severity 1) is resolved 
That brings me back to my original case as to who is responsible for a problem caused by free software! Ultimately, it’s the end user. Thankfully, Sygate, in this case, had a forum in which some users had already experienced similar problems and put up some posts that I happened to find. This was excellent. Would I recommend Sygate to anyone else, YES. I would only mention to the users that if they happen to run Cisco VPN Dialer software that it might be in their best interest to run ZoneAlarm!! I love free software - including some of the small gotchas that come with it. In this life, we’re all beta testers!
Chuck
See the thread that helped me resolve my problem (including my post to Sygate - asking them for some sort of fix to this issue):
http://forums.sygate.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=59569#post59569
Email: c h u c k (at) g o f i x i t (dot) c o m
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