Worthless freeware?: Linksys Log Viewer

I'm looking at a number of the log tools available for a couple of different Firewall products. I'm trying to determine how useful these tools are in determining what the Firewall is providing in the way of protection. I'm currently using the Linksys BEFSX41 Firewall / router.

The first log tool I decided to look at was included on the Linksys products install CD. Linksys bundles a program called Logviewer and also makes the program available for download from the support section of their website. The program installs in seconds on a Windows PC and on execution shows up in the task bar.

When you run this program it displays a window on the screen with tabs to separate the view of incoming and outgoing traffic. The program doesn't seem to allow incoming and outgoing traffic to be viewed on the screen at the same time.

The biggest problem I had was getting this program to actually display all the information that it captured in its window. I could not re-size the Logviewer window and there was no option of going full screen. The program doesn't have a command bar. I could change the size of each of the columns. I wound up making the date and time columns really small and unreadable in order to be able to read the destination port column (that includes what was done to the packets).

I thought that maybe the version of this program that I retrieved from the CD was old. Just in case I downloaded and installed the utility from the Linksys support pages. Alas, there was no version number listed for Logviewer at the web site or in the filename.

About all I can say is that using Logviewer you will be able to figure out if the Linksys device is sending data to the log host. Since Logviewer can't get the most basic data fields up on to the screen at the same time it's not really very useful for trying to visually analyze what's going on at the Firewall.