I need to open a range of ports in Windows Firewall

[Guest]

Hello,

I need to open a range of ports on some machines running the Windows XP SP2
firewall. Is there a way to do this easily?

The WinXP firewall is a third-level defense mechanism within our
organization. The alternative is to disable it and I am not fond of that
idea since the security "potion" that we use (including the Windows firewall)
seems to be very effective. However, the application that is misbehaving
with the firewall on is a critical application and thus my only two viable
options are to either open the necessary Windows firewall ports to allow the
necessary server commuication or disable the firewall completely.

Any ideas?

Doug.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

You can add ports to the exception list for Windows Firewall but As far as I
know you can not add a range but have to specify each port individually
which is a hassle if you need to open more than a few ports. For Active
Directory domain computers you can do this once via Group Policy. It may
also be done via the netsh firewall command as shown below for the domain
profile. Workgroup computers would use standard instead. --- Steve

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Customizing-Windows-Firewall.html
To allow incoming traffic on TCP port 80 for an XP SP2 machine running as an
intranet web server in a workgroup environment, use the following command:

netsh firewall add portopening protocol=TCP port=80 name="Web Server (TCP
80)" mode=ENABLE scope=SUBNET profile=DOMAIN.