Jetico Personal Firewall Incompatible?

[0strodamus 5]

Is ESET NOD32 Antivirus x64 compatible with Jetico Personal Firewall? I have tried versions 4.2.71.5, 5.2.15.2, 6.0.316.0, and 7.0.28.0 beta on Windows 7 x64 without success. The only version that seems to work is 3.0.695.0. I have tried creating a bypass everything with logging rule in Jetico Firewall in the hopes to find some clue as to what the problem is. However, nothing is ever logged. I have also tried testing in a VM that mimics my real system setup, as well as a default Windows install.

 

The main symptom that I am seeing is that after a reboot, the ESET main window opens with the graphics header being the only thing displayed. The entire rest of the main window is blank white space (see attachment).

 

The other symptom is that the Jetico Personal Firewall GUI doesn't launch. After a period of time has passed, an error message is displayed by NOD32 saying "Error communicating with kernel."

 

Any help getting ESET and Jetico Personal Firewall running together would be much appreciated!

[JavierSeguraNA 36]

Hello and welcome to the forum!

1. I tried to research on Jetico's forums but they seem to be down.
2. Jetico personal firewall has a new version out, are you running their latest version?
3. According to their website, you can create rules to allow specific applications (much like ESS), have you attempted this? Your post says you enabled logging, but I don't see based on your post that you have actually attempted to create a rule to allow ESET NOD32.
4. The easy route would be to uninstall ESET using hxxp://kb.eset.com/esetkb/soln2289&ref=esf
5. After reboot make sure your firewall is running as expected, and install NOD32 again
6. Pay attention to any notifications that pop-up, they might be asking you whether you want to allow or block ESET.
7. If this doesn't work, contact Jetico support for help with configuring their software to work with ours since it is the firewall that must be configured to allow ESET in this case.

[0strodamus 5]

Hi and thank you for the reply.

 

I was posting in the hopes of finding out whether or not Jetico Firewall is compatible with your antivirus. Many other companies maintain such compatibility lists. Based on your reply I can't tell if you are indicating that ESET is or is not compatible. Here are my responses to the questions you asked:

 

2. Yes, I am running the latest version.

3. Yes, perhaps I should have been more clear. When I wrote that I created a "bypass everything with logging rule" this means an allow everything rule. Everything includes ESET. There is also a built-in rule to completely allow everything which I also tried unsuccessfully.

4. My testing has been in a virtual machine, so uninstalling ESET is not necessary when I can restore a snapshot. This I have done several times in 2 different virtual machines. If I can't get satisfactory results in a virtual machine, I certainly am not going to install on my real system.

7. I will try to contact Jetico. My point in posting here was that I have had no problems using this firewall with several competing antivirus products including Kaspersky, Avira, Avast, and Vba32.

 

I used to be a customer of ESET and happily used version 2.7 up until it was no longer supported. I would like to once again become a customer of ESET, but I can't do that until I get this problem sorted out. Hopefully, I will be able to get an answer either here, from Jetico, or from further testing on my own. Thanks again for the reply. I really do appreciate it.

Edited June 16, 2013 by 0strodamus

[0strodamus 5]

Based on this post and further testing in a VM, I have determined that eamonm.sys is the driver causing the problem. I have tested in a 32bit VM and there are no conflicts, so it is limited to the 64bit version. Unfortunately, I can't get my virtual machine to bluescreen, so I have no dumps to upload to ESET.

[JavierSeguraNA 36]

We'll try to find out more information on our end as well. Thank you for the information you've provided, and I hope that in the end you'll return as a customer!

[0strodamus 5]

I greatly appreciate you checking on this. I haven't heard anything from Jetico yet, but if I do I will certainly update this thread. And I can very easily commit to you that I will return as a customer once this conflict gets resolved. Thanks again for looking into this and my hope is also to return as a NOD32 customer.

[0strodamus 5]

I submitted an official support request via https://www.eset.com/us/support/contact/# last week. This is what I wrote:

 

Hi, I am having issues running versions 4 - 7beta of ESET NOD32 antivirus alongside Jetico Firewall. Details of the problems I am seeing are in this posting at the ESET forum: https://forum.eset.com/topic/339-jetico-personal-firewall-incompatible/. Is Jetico Firewall compatible with this antivirus? I am not currently a customer, but used to be. I plan to purchase a license as soon as I am able to overcome the issues I am having running ESET alongside my firewall. Any help or guidance would be appreciated. Thanks and have a great day!

And this was the response:

 

Update for Case #1040979 - "Other Issue - Other products or services issue"

An ESET Customer Care Representative has updated this case with the following information:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting ESET Customer Care.

ESET Customer Care does not provide support for beta products.

I guess the support rep doesn't understand that "versions 4 - 7beta" includes versions 4, 5, and 6. Is this typical of ESET's official support channel? To look for the easiest excuse to turn a customer away or was someone just having a bad day? I ordered a retail boxed NOD32 from amazon.com shortly before I received this response thinking that the incompatibility can be resolved. Now I'm questioning my decision to purchase.

 

I have been in contact with Jetico's support and they have been nothing short of stellar so far. They haven't been able to completely resolve the issues, but they are trying.

[JavierSeguraNA 36]

Hello 0stradamus,

 

I apologize for the miscommunication. We are still testing on our end as well. I remember Jetico from back in the day, seems like they improved some things over the years not to mention their website. In any matter, while testing on both ends is still in progress, I was wondering if you could go through this article when you have time and configure the firewall to allow these specific addresses and ports. I realize that you have bypassed everything with logging rule, however if everything worked as expected we wouldn't be having this conversation . Please let me know how it goes.
hxxp://kb.eset.com/esetkb/SOLN332&ref=esf

[0strodamus 5]

Hi JavierSeguraNA,

 

Thanks for the reply and apology. I am just anxious for a solution, but I also understand that these things happen. Hopefully, when this incompatibility is fixed if I ever need the official support my experience will be better next time. I've been using Jetico since back in the day and it has served me very well. They did update the website recently and it looks nice.

 

I read through the article you referenced and must say that I am impressed with ESET's transparency regarding the specific addresses the software will contact and the reason why. Unfortunately, allowing all of these addresses didn't make any difference with the issues I'm having. I also tried again to simply activate all of the bypass rules within Jetico Firewall without success. In my opinion, this issue goes much deeper than a simple misconfiguration of the firewall's rules. This seems fairly apparent to me based on the symptoms I have observed and that renaming eamonm.sys in safe mode eliminates all of the symptoms. Plus NOD32 version 3 with eamon.sys works fine. Just versions 4-6 and beta 7 with eamonm.sys cause the problems. Something changed between drivers eamon.sys and eamonm.sys. Because of this, I am curious on the testing that has been done on your end. Can you share with me what you are seeing when you test? The Jetico developer confirmed that he was seeing the eamonm.sys issue too, so I'm curious if you guys have as well. Thanks again and I'm looking forward to hearing back from you.

 

EDIT: Grammatical corrections.

Edited July 1, 2013 by 0strodamus

[JavierSeguraNA 36]

Hello 0strodamus,

I'll have some data for you this Wednesday.

[0strodamus 5]

That sounds great! Thanks JavierSeguraNA!

[0strodamus 5]

@JavierSeguraNA: Do you have any data yet?

[JavierSeguraNA 36]

Yes I do. After testing several different scenarios where ESET NOD32 was installed before and after Jetico firewall was installed, we have some good data to show that it is Jetico firewall's rules functionality that is breaking our software. Regardless of the settings and rules, the Jetico firewall does not hold the settings in order to allow our software to work. Through the program, there is absolutely no way around this. At this point, the Jetico firewall software must be the point of solution in order to resolve this issue. I will send you a PM so I can hand over the screenshots of the test to you.

I appreciate your patience! Best of luck.

[0strodamus 5]

Jetico has released an updated version that fixes the compatibility issues.

 

My sincere thanks to JavierSeguraNA for kindly replying to my thread and for confirming the compatibility issues.

Edited July 25, 2013 by 0strodamus