Zone Alarm Settings Bug

At the moment I am not able to use the Symantec Internet Worm protection, so I decided to try the famous ZoneAlarm.

I downloaded the demo version (which they claim to be just like the full version) of the ZoneAlarm Security Suite.

I have been a network administrator before, so I know how to proper setup a firewall and define which ports I want open and which I need to close.

Anyway, I had finished all the configuration on ZoneAlarm, clicked Apply and OK and put the application to rest when IE7 froze and I needed to give my machine a hard reset.

After Windows was alive and kicking again, I start receiving several alerts from ZoneAlarm regarding some ports I had previously opened.

I scratched my head... “What the heck? I had just configured those port open. Why it's blocking the connection?”

I went back to ZoneAlarm Control Panel and sure enough, all the configuration I did, which took me quite some time to personalize and refine to my taste, was gone.

It simply was not there.

It was just like I had just installed.

Factory default.

That couldn't be true. So I did the "Average Joe Test": I set some configuration, applied them thoroughly, and checked if they were functioning... I closed the ZoneAlarm Control Panel and check if they were still working.

They were. All the configuration I did was working perfectly.

Then I hit the reset button. Just like that.

When I went back to check if the configuration it was gone. Again.

But now I know what went wrong.

Apparently ZoneAlarm only saves the configuration you do when it's shutting down.

To test my theory I reconfigured ZoneAlarm once more, but this time I shutdown properly. And sure enough all my configurations were there when the computer went up again.

So, what's out there for the folks at ZoneLabs? Simple they need to remember to save the configuration the moment the user press the OK button, no when the application is shutting down, because sometimes it doesn't.

And the same lesson applies to us developers.