I decided to buy GlassWire after trying it out for a week or so.
I’m not what you would call an “advanced” user, but I understand the basics of how a Firewall works and what it attempts to do.
In regards to GlassWire: I might be overlooking it, but is there a way to determine what connection protocol is being used whenever an app attempts a connection?
Second question: Do apps/programs that phone home, do so on a set schedule? I’m seeing some hard to decipher alerts being made by GlassWire for certain Windows10 components as far as “time of day” attempts are being made.
Third question: Do programs exist that, instead of “phoning home” at certain times of the day, are pinged, queried, or commanded by a remote company server to phone home ONLY when requested by the remote server?
To quickly find traffic types you can go to the graph, then click “traffic” to see what traffic is being sent at the time interval you chose. You can then see what app is responsible for that traffic type next to it.
This is also visible under “usage”.
I think all apps behave differently as far as timing. Windows has no set schedule for apps to phone home that I know of.
For the third question, with Windows I guess anything is possible. But on modern networks it’s very unlikely your PC can get pinged since you’re most likely behind a router of some type that wouldn’t allow this. So no, I don’t think many apps would work that way because it would not be very reliable. I guess they could be queried though remotely.
You are talking about server push in contrast to client pull as described in your second question.
Providing notifications when new info comes available is one example. Another example might be be making updates available by geographic region to balance the load on servers.
It can be difficult to tell which method is really being used because a push can be simulated with a pull. The client can, as you say, phone home but the server can chose to ignore the request until it is ready to do the work.
The reason I asked about the connection protocol is that I will be creating/hosting servers(on occasion) on my PC for some legacy games that myself and some friends like to play.(Half-Life, Quake 2/3…etc.). These games use UDP traffic and I can configure specific UDP ports in my server.cfg file that clients must use in order to join my server. I will be using port forwarding in my router to establish a range of permissible ports to help support this.
The problem - is that in order for a client to connect, they must know the servername/IP for my server in order to join it. I would like to configure GlassWire to be able to block ALL internet traffic other than the client/sever traffic for the game(s) I will be hosting. Is there a way, using GlassWire, to do this?
I think you misunderstand. I would like to block(or lockdown my PC) to ALL internet traffic, and only allow the game server program to have inbound/outbound traffic during the time the program will be running.
