AtGuard/NIS General Configuration Information

Feature Availability and OS compatibility by version of AG/NIS/NPF: Table

This table illustrates some of the basic configuration settings appropriate (and available) for various versions of AG and NIS/NPF. We will discuss these variables in more details under Settings.

The top of the table presents the best information available to us as to which versions of AG and NIS/NPF are compatible with which Microsoft Windows Operating System variants. As you can see, some versions have limited functionality on some operating systems and, in other instances, we are uncertain as to whether (and to what extent) the AG/NIS/NPF version is functional on that OS.

The next part of the table, however, is probably of more value to people just starting to explore AG/NIS/NPF. It not only shows what basic configuration options are available for each version of AG/NIS/NPF, but also where the user is likely to find a capability to set these options. (And in NIS/NPF, the location of some of these options has changed from one release to another.)

There are roughly 30 of these basic configuration parameters in the latest versions of NIS/NPF. And how the firewall actually operates can be critically dependent not only on individual settings, but (sometimes) on combinations of these settings.

The second major column in the lower half of the table defines the Domain over which each of these basic configuration settings can be varied. This table was initially used to specify what basic configuration variables were to be displayed in Albert Janssen's NIS Settings utility (which also works with the last versions of AtGuard). And, in this context, a domain specification of IGNORE or VARIABLE simply indicates that these variables are not to be included in NIS Settings.

Prior to NIS 4.5, one would use Albert's AGNIS Rules Viewer to view/document the specific firewall rules and ad-blocking parameters. Unfortunately, Albert's utilties do not work with NIS 4.5 or NIS/NPF 6.0 due to encryption of these settings implemented by Symantec. Consequently, there is no easy way for a user to view/document these basic configuration settings in the latest versions of NIS/NPF.

At the current time, there is no utility available that allows the user to view/document either

• the IP addresses listed in the Trusted/Restricted Zones (NIS/NPF 3.0+),
• the IP addresses in the Exclusions List for AutoBlock (NIS/NPF 3.0+),
• the specific information to be blocked under Confidential Information (NIS FE 3.0+),
• or the specific User Accounts that may exist (NIS FE 3.0+).

The user must rely exclusively on the NIS Console to view this information and the Console provides no capability to document it.

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