Purpose of the 'Select Adapter' setting

[JakeTheSnake]

What is the purpose of the 'Select Adapter' setting? I have two computers, A and B. A is connected to the internet via a 3G wireless broadband adapter (PC Card via PC Card/PCI adapter). A and B are connected together via an Ethernet LAN connection. Internet Connection Sharing is used to allow B to use A as a gateway to the internet. I am running PCTools Firewall Plus on computer A.

The firewall lists two adapters, one for the Ethernet adapter, and one 'WAN Miniport'. What is the effect of choosing either the Ethernet adapter or the 'WAN Miniport'? Does the firewall only run on one or the other? What is the effect of choosing 'Auto Select'? Does the firewall choose one or the other according to some (smart?) algorithm, or does it run on both of the interfaces?

[hdavid]

The current version of PC Tools Firewall Plus monitors only one adapter at a time. It’s better not to specifically choose an adapter and let the firewall to automatically identify the adapter with the public IP (that would be 'WAN Miniport') and monitor it. The impact of that is that your LAN will not be monitored by the firewall but your Internet connection will. The next version of the firewall monitors all network adapters and introduces two zones (Internet and Trusted) which use different rules. In your case I would say that in the next version you should have 'WAN Miniport' on the Internet zone and the Ethernet adapter on trusted zone). Hope this information helped.

[JakeTheSnake]

Thanks a bunch, exactly the info I needed.

I have, however, observed that if I choose auto-select, PCTFP does not select the WAN miniport, it always selects the LAN i/f. So I have manually selected the WAN miniport.

[hdavid]

This is weird. We will investigate that because it supposes to automatically select the adapter with the public IP. Thanks for the information we will check it out. It will not be relevant though to the next version in which we monitor all network adapters

[JakeTheSnake]

My theory is that this is simply because I have configured PCTFWP to start at Windows startup. Since the 3G modem is actually a dial-up connection, it is not active at Windows startup, and therefore has no public IP address (no address at all). So I suppose PCTFWP chooses the only i/f with an IP address (the LAN i/f). And when I do dial up the 3G service, I suppose that the 'bug' is that PCTFWP doesn't switch over from the LAN to the 3G WAN i/f with the new public IP address?

[hdavid]

Thanks for the information. We'll try to replicate this