I am curently running "Zone Alarm" as my fire wall....but when connected to vendetta my /ping goes though the roof and lags badly.
Trouble is when i turn off my firewall, i'm getting that "sasser worm" probing the inner reaches of my computer.

Common sense says "dont turn on the pc with out the firewall", But that little devil on my shoulder says " go on....it'll be ok to play for a bit...turn it off"

Have i got the firewall set up wrong, or is there any other advice that someone can give me?

Use the windows integrated firewall if you're on xp (which you must be, since sasser doesn't affect ME/98). It doesn't block the game, and does block sasser.

Or, play with ZoneAlarm. I have zonealarm on, no ping troubles. I guess I'm just weird.

One of these days, we (or someone) should figure out what exactly ZoneAlarm does that lags the game, and how to prevent that.

Have you tried setting up a specific rule to allow UDP traffic to and from majikthise.guildsoftware.com?

it inspects packets before transmitting/recieving. Usually dont notice it for web stuff or whatnot, but with games, especially with the heavy compression, it takes a while to scan the packet...

block port 445/tcp, which sasser uses to propagate.

Or get a Mac and never worry about worms again...


-ts-

Or get linux.

I don't think you can say "get linux so you don't have to worry about security" though I am all for people getting linux.

Hmm yea ZoneAlarm must take a lot of time looking at packets, if I play with Sygate Personal Firewall on I get no lag at all, so what you can do on ZoneAlarm(I hope) similar to what a1k0n said is allow Vendetta to use the network without being inspected. If you can do this then ZoneAlarm will just let all the packets through that come on the Vendetta game port. Vendetta runs on port 21141. So even opening port 21141 to the world may fix the problem. I really doubt you should worry that much by opening one port. If you do then do what a1k0n said and find a way to open a static route that goes from the game server to your machine and allow that traffic only.

A Linksys hardware router also works nicely...and you can cover more than one PC with that :P

lets be sure about one thing:
[greg@mephisto greg]% uname -a
Linux mephisto 2.4.25-lck1 #2 Mon Mar 15 23:34:28 CET 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
[greg@mephisto greg]%

:p. Update to 2.6--it's well worth it!

vendetta hard-crashes my box on DRI drivers, which i use on 2.6. On 2.4 i use ATI proprietary drivers and all is ok. No i will not use ati's proprietary stuff in 2.6 cause i can use opensource there.