[jaguar]

There are some distinctly separate issues here: incoming, outgoing, application-level and packet-level. Each requires do varying degrees different solutions.

For seeing what your computer is spewing out I recommend Zone-alarm. In terms of protection a cheap firewall/router will do the job but a cheap ancient PC (486 will do it) with 2 ethernet cards running Smoothwall, IPcop or something similar will provide a far higher level of protection and easy configuration. Smoothwall et al also provide detailed logging if desired and you can add in a proxy like squid for detailed web traffic info as well.

Nothing will provide an all-in-one instant security and monitoring solution but an IPcop box will give you much of what you need and includes some smarter anti-cracker stuff like Snort.