cygwin/x and zonealarm firewall

["BJ Garman" <bj_garman at hotmail dot com>]

I saw on the website that some users had problems getting cygwin/x to run 
properly with ZoneAlarm firewall by zonelabs to work. I myself played around 
with it and found that it can be made to work easily by setting a few simple 
things within your zonealarm firewall. Cygwin/x must be able to act as a 
server and must be able to use its default ip addressing. Cygwin/x uses 
xterm.exe and xwin.exe in order to establish the x-windows server as far as 
I can tell. Anytime a program tries to access a network, the internet, or 
act like a server, zonealarm registers that as trying to access the 
internet, and zonealarm has a whole section of its program that deals with 
which programs are trying to access the internet. Once a program tries to 
access the internet, zonealarm makes a entry in a list. This list can be 
viewed easily through zonealarm. Red colored"X"'s represent programs are are 
blocked to internet access. Green check-marks are programs that are allowed. 
Question marks are programs that, if trying to access the internet, will 
cause a dialogue box to pop up asking you as a user to allow or deny this 
program access to the internet. ZoneAlarm can be set up to notify you any 
time a new program tries to access the internet. Once you know which program 
it is, you can go into the zonealarm program list, find the program, click 
and hold where question marks, checks, or x's are to change it, and then 
change it to whatever you want. Usually there are 2 categories to set for 
each program, access and server. For cygwin/x, the server category can 
remain blocked. The access category, which has two parts, trusted and 
internet, must both be set to allow(green check-mark). Afterwards, each 
program that accesses cygwin/x in order to display must also be allowed. I 
have mine set up to ask when a program it doesn't know about tries to access 
the internet. If it happens right after I have tries starting an cygwin/x 
program, then I know that program is causing the dialogue box from 
zonealarm. I click on allow, then later go into the zonealarm program list 
and permanently allow that program access. Then zonealarm will not ask me 
again about it. As long as you do this, you can run both cygwin/x programs 
and zonealarm concurrently.
I hope this information is useful to someone.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Garman

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