What Netgear Firewall settings should I have?

Fran

I used the blocker on Netgear Router Firewall settings to block 3 or 4 words only, about 3 or 4 weeks ago. Now when I do an Alta Vista search for very harmless words or sometimes when I use links a big black page comes up "BLOCKED BY NETGEAR FIREWALL". I've looked at the firewall settings and given that originally everything was fine I don't really want to change them without knowing why. What settings should I use? Could this be the work of a virus (as I've had 4 this week on 3 days which were removed by AVG (but I wasn't notified as they usually do, only found out by checking the test results).

BaritoneUK

I have a netgear DG834G adsl router modem thing. It sounds similar to yours as it has firewall settings to block out sites with certain keywords.

It works by blocking out sites with keywords in the url or title. If for example you block out the word '!!!!!!' this would block out any site with the word !!!!!!, sporn, sporned, exporned (ok I am making up words here, but you get my point).

Check the url that gets blocked. I have a thought that when you get a site blocked by your netgear firewall it contains one of your blocked words in the url. It can't be a software issue as it is on your hardware. It won't be a virus either as again the problem is on the router not your computer.

Hope that helps.

blinky

Altavista results do seem to be very spammy. I noticed this when running a position report for a client.
I would try a different search engine.
Lycos and Yahoo both use the same database as Altavista (all owned by Yahoo) although Yahoo seems to have better spam filters.
Google has recently made changes to it's ranking algorithm so you might find their results quite good.
I haven't really looked at MSN since the beta engine so it's also worth a try.

Toxteth_OGrady

Hi Fran,

On some firewalls, you can make the url blocking keywords exact by using quotation marks.

So sex would block sex and sextuplet

whereas "sex" would block sex but allow Essex

Give it a try.

:cool:

TOG

Fran

Thanks for the replies. I've tried google and it works fine, just Alta Vista is a problem, off now to alter the words....