Haven't posted in a while because I was in Russia for a few weeks checking out the smog, vodka, and beautiful women. Now I'm back, and I have a quick non-database item to relate.
Today I was working on scheduling the execution of some updater software from a small data vendor of ours. As it turns out, they have no spec or unified framework for their error handling and messages, so I had to work out what sort of errors could happen on my own. One thing the updater does is log on to the vendor's server via FTP and download new files. So naturally I wanted to prevent this to see what would happen.
The easiest way would have been to just unplug my network connection, but the app needs some files that live on the network, so that was out.
I tried to block the program with Windows Firewall, but we've got a bunch of Group Policy stuff applied there, which complicated things. Even when I unchecked my local firewall exception for the app, and then also the exception for FTP, the application connected to the vendor's FTP server without any trouble.
Next I went out and found a 3rd party app that could block ports. The one I settled on after a quick browse of some security sites was Ghost Personal Firewall. Simple, straightforward, free, quick installation - suited my needs perfectly. And it worked great. It took 2 minutes to download, install (no reboot needed), and configure a rule to block all traffic on port 21. This had the desired effect of breaking the app and producing an error log.
So consider this an unsolicited endorsement of Ghost's firewall. Served my purpose just fine, and it's going into my security toolkit for future app testing.
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