xp sp2 firewall gotcha
General August 23rd, 2004
I put XP Service Pack 2 on my bittorrent testbed machine in my office, and found a gotcha with XPSP2’s firewall. (SP2 adds a great deal more firewalling and security, since, well, it needed it.) The problem with some of these security features, while great for home PCs and most of the world at large, do not play well in a corporate environment where file shares, network services, backups, etc. aren’t accustomed to having their access silently yanked.
XP SP2 will turn off file sharing, but it’s easy to reenable when you setup a share. It will even tell you it opened up the firewall to do so. What it does not tell you is that it opens it up to the same subnet only. If you want to access that share from a different IP subnet, you need to tweak the firewall settings (located in a different place from the share config.)
I wasn’t expecting that gotcha, and wanted to blog about it in case that came up somewhere else. Most services, it seems, are enabled just on the local subnet. You can either open it up to the whole world, or list the subnets that can talk to it.
Overall, the service pack seems pretty nice. I’m sure I’ll have a different opinion of it when it releases to the public at-large.
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bittorrent????XP service pack 2 now out for download! Love the pop up blocker, haven’t really noticed any problems, yet.