firewall question

One of our employees visited a joke site and every
since we've been plagued with resource consuming
background apps and popups. We've bought spyware
and anti popup ware but "some" still get thru somehow.
And some of the intrusive download installs will reinstall
themselves if I don't boot to dos to delete them. And
don't even try the Windows uninstall.
Well we got a simple firewall and tried experimenting
with running it on one node. It blocks the internet fine
but what a pain having to set passes for every app that
comes over from another node. We run a peer to peer
local network that's intraneted to the web thru a dsl
router.
My main question, is there any way to run a firewall
on a local net with DCHP ? I mean it appears to find
the node "name" but it then configs it to the ip of that day
and boot up which may not be the exact same ip the
next time around. Appreciate any info on all of the above.

D wrote:
> One of our employees visited a joke site and every
> since we've been plagued with resource consuming
> background apps and popups. We've bought spyware
> and anti popup ware but "some" still get thru somehow.
> And some of the intrusive download installs will reinstall
> themselves if I don't boot to dos to delete them. And
> don't even try the Windows uninstall.

It's not likely a firewall would prevent spyware from getting onto your
computers. For a program that keeps reinstalling themselves, you will need
to find a browser hijacker removal program. Anti-spyware programs won't work
against these hijackers usually, as they keep renaming themselves all of the
time.

Your simplest course of action against a hijacked browser is to stop using
Internet Explorer and start using Firefox instead. Once you get used to FF,
you'll wonder why you ever used IE.

If you're running with Windows XP and have downloaded the Service Pack 2,
then that installs an updated version of IE that has an "Manage Add-ons"
option under the Tools menu. It will list all programs that have attached
themselves to IE, and allow you to unlink them. Some of them may be
legitimate tools, such as the Yahoo or Google toolbars, perhaps the
Macromedia Flash plug-in, etc. Others you'll have to think about and find
out what they do.

If you aren't running Windows XP SP2, then you can still do uninstall IE
add-ons, but you'll have to download a program called HijackThis! to do it
(completely free). Again, just like with Manage Add-ons in the previous
example, this thing will list a combination of legitimate and illegitimate
add-ins, it's upto you to figure out which ones are which.

> Well we got a simple firewall and tried experimenting
> with running it on one node. It blocks the internet fine
> but what a pain having to set passes for every app that
> comes over from another node. We run a peer to peer
> local network that's intraneted to the web thru a dsl
> router.

If you're running something like ZoneAlarm or Sygate personal firewalls,
they all have an option to allow full internal network links amongst a
trusted network of machines. You once you activate that, then the nodes will
be able to talk to each other as if the firewalls didn't exist between them.

> My main question, is there any way to run a firewall
> on a local net with DCHP ? I mean it appears to find
> the node "name" but it then configs it to the ip of that day
> and boot up which may not be the exact same ip the
> next time around. Appreciate any info on all of the above.

Sure, most of the personal firewalls will all you to do that. They can all
be configured to recognize the local subnet and treat it as a trusted zone.

Yousuf Khan