I am using Avast! 4 Home Edition with Windows 98 and
I want to install a firmware firewall (D-link Dir-100).
What has to be opened in the firewall at least for normal
use: Web access, Web Shield and Mail (Outlook Express)?
Thank you! After reading these and other support information
I still cannot even get the login page from the router to
configure it. The router responds to ping OK, and there is no
software firewall installed so perhaps the Web Shield is stopping the login page (the PC has Windows 98).
Is it possible to temporarily disable or bypass the Web
Shield without uninstalling Avast! 4?
E g by killing the web shield processes?
By default, without specific configuration, web shield is not touching HTTP communication in any way on Windows 95/98/ME, so did you configure proxy server in your browser?
Thank you again! I tried to remove the Manual Proxy setting
in Firefox browser and changed it to Direct Connection to
Internet and now everything seems to work.
But the WebShield FAQ answers told me to configure the
browser with “Use a proxy for your LAN” with Windows 98
(as I understood it).
So will the On-Access Scanning still work if there is no
proxy setting in the browsers?
No, its’ not working in Windows 95 operating systems.
Under certain conditions, it is necessary to bypass the WebShield's transparent proxy and set things up manually. This includes the following situations:
If you are using Windows 95/98/ME. WebShield's transparent proxy only works under NT-based operating system.
WebShield is a local proxy which watches for viruses coming trough web (HTTP) traffics. Under Windows NT-based operating systems, it can work “transparently” for major browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox without any configuration but under Windows 95 operating systems, you need configure it for each browser according to the configuration of the videos.
If your computer has no software firewall and you cannot browse even when you configure your browser all right, I don’t know what is preventing web shield from connecting to the net (and your router in your LAN). For web shield is simply watching for viruses and doesn’t indiscriminately stop HTTP connection although it can make the traffics slower.
After some experiments I found that to connect to the router the browser
has to be configured to “Direct Connection to the Internet”.
So now I have two different browsers, one with “Direct Connection” to
connect to the router and one configured to “Use a Proxy Server for LAN”
to connect to Internet.
But I have not found any explanation to why the login page from the router
is different from a page from a website on the Internet.
That’s odd. Only possibility I can think of is that your “firmware firewall” might be preventing your browser from accessing directly to the router trough port 12080, which is WebShield’s local port for your machine. Could you check the configuration of your “firmware firewall”?
[Edit]Or, you could simply put your router’s address in “No Proxy For:” blank for the browser by which you like to configure your router.