firewalls and network drives

[krysia]

I run the free ZoneAlarm firewall, and I have no trouble logging in to my VPN with it.  However, ZoneAlarm will no longer let me access my network drive there (even though when I first installed it, it did) - I have to disable the firewall in order to access the drive, which makes me pretty uncomfortable, even though I've been assured that the VPN itself is hard to hack into.  At one point it worked switching to the Windows firewall, but now that doesn't let me access the drive either.  I've looked to see if I can change settings in ZoneAlarm, but so far I'm flummoxed - can anyone advise me?

Thanks!  Krysia

[Rik]

Hi Krysia

I'm about as much use as an umbrella in a gale when it comes to VPN.

The only thing I can suggest it to revert to the standard troubleshooting question, "What's changed?". Are you aware of any software changes at either end, maybe Windows updates for example?

[krysia]

I think it first happened when ZoneAlarm had an update, but I don't want to revert to an old version of the firewall.  Accessing the VPN itself has never been any problem at all - I've never had to do anything to the firewall settings in order to connect, so I don't understand why accessing the network drive is proving impossible with the firewll on.

[Inactive]

I dumped ZA .. it was forever causing problems, I now use Comodo, I find it far better and easier to use, it is also free.

[psp83]

NAS drives are known to have access problems with firewalls.. A co-worker had the same problem at work with NIS..

Try putting the NAS IP address into the safe list/zone.

[somanyholes]

Hey

It sounds like your firewall has decided to block file/printer sharing over the vpn connection ( as long as the vpn is definitely up). Have you looked in the alerts/logs section of za just after you have tried to access the shared drive? There should be some errors in there which should help to establish at what point it is failing.

[colirv]

I've just installed Comodo - it and my Netgear SC101 do not get along. Even though it's in a trusted zone in the end I've had to tell Comodo not to worry about fragmented packets or protocol analysis.