Something else broken, the firewall!

[GoldenWonder]

MS are really doing their best to push me towards Mac/Linux!

 

Now I've discovered the firewall in W7 is useless. I have an app that everyone runs that connects to and SQL Server. But on W7 all i get the the usual Error 26 - 26 - locating server instance yada yada which bascially means it can't connect.

 

Done everything as per MS - enable the App in the firewall rules, open the TCP/UDP port 1434 to allow SQL browser but to no avail.

 

Logging is enabled in the firewall but the log file remains empty - yet as soon as I disabled the firewall the app works straight away. Honestly this OS is barely suitable for home use at the moment!

 

Edit: proof positive that the W7 firewall is a crock, when you remove firewall policies from a GPO, they remain on the affected machines no matter how many reboots/gpupdates you do! looks like W7 will have to run with the firewall disabled - what a step backward

Edited October 1, 2010 by GoldenWonder

[koryo]

Hi GoldenWonder

 

The reason that the group policys remain after you remove parts from the GPO is because the group policy system is one way.

 

Basically you set the setting with group policy, then removed parts of the policy. Removing parts of the policy doesn't revert what was set on the workstation, it just stops those policy parts being applied to machienes that haven't had the settings applied. The only thing you can do is overwrite the policy with one that reverts the settings you made, which isn't always applicable.

 

Can't really help on the firewall side of things as i haven't experienced this error before, but if you could post up the entire error, im sure someone would be able to help? ^_^

[srochford]

Another thing which you don't mention but might be relevant - there are several sets of firewall rules (I think they're called public, private and domain) and if (say) you're making changes to the domain settings but your machine thinks it's on a public network then you're not going to get anywhere.

 

One of the things which can cause confusion is installing VMWare or other virtualisation software - it installs dummy network adapters which confuse the Windows network stack.